HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World)

Concept

HNSW is a graph-based approximate nearest neighbor algorithm that builds a multi-layer proximity graph for fast vector search. It keeps the whole graph in memory, which makes it fast but RAM-intensive at large scale.

Title graphic: HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) (Concept)

Type	Concept
Wikipedia	en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_navigable_small_world

Glossary

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Sources

Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_navigable_small_world

Maintained by Mirko Peters (Microsoft MVP) · Last updated: 2026-11-03