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AI Tip: When to Use Natural Language Search vs. Regular Search

  • November 20, 2025
  • 0 replies
  • 6 views

Ryanne Perry
Community Manager
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Quick heads-up for anyone using Natural Language Search (NLS) in the Asset Library: You’ll get the best results by toggling between NLS and regular search depending on what you’re looking for.

Here’s why:

Regular Search
Use this when you’re searching for something specific, like a SKU, file name, or tag.
Our standard search and NLS actually use different query methods/backends, so structured metadata (like a product number) is matched more reliably with regular search.

Natural Language Search (NLS)
Turn this on when you want to search by description or concept, like:

  • “men wearing hat”
  • “winter office scene”
  • “modern healthcare workspace”

For Natural Language Search (NLS), we use a multi-modal embedding model to retrieve results. This type of machine learning model can translate both images and text into multi-dimensional numerical vectors. Each dimension represents a feature the model has learned during training. Now, replicate that across hundreds of dimensions and you get a model capable of capturing complex aspects of reality in numerical form, across both text and images. When you run a natural language query, the search engine converts your query into a vector and then looks for images in the asset bank with