---
title: "HyDE: hypothetical document embeddings"
sidebarTitle: "HyDE"
description: "Generate a hypothetical answer, then retrieve documents similar to it."
---

An LLM writes a hypothetical document answering the query, and that document --
not the query -- is embedded and used for retrieval. It works because a
plausible answer sits nearer the real answers in embedding space than a question
does.

<Note>
This example is a runnable notebook in the
[vectordb-recipes](https://github.com/lancedb/vectordb-recipes) repository rather than a page here.
</Note>

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Open in Colab" icon="google" href="https://colab.research.google.com/github/lancedb/vectordb-recipes/blob/main/examples/Advance-RAG-with-HyDE/main.ipynb">
    Run it end to end in the browser.
  </Card>
  <Card title="View on GitHub" icon="github" href="https://github.com/lancedb/vectordb-recipes/tree/main/examples/Advance-RAG-with-HyDE">
    Read the source.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>