SmartSearch: Deterministic Ranking Beats LLM-Structured Ingestion for Conversational Memory Retrieval
arXiv 2603.15599·medium signal
Challenges the dominant pattern of using LLMs to structure memory at ingestion time. SmartSearch uses a fully deterministic pipeline — NER-weighted substring matching plus BM25 — and outperforms learned retrieval policies on conversational memory benchmarks. The result suggests practitioners may be overcomplicating memory systems: expensive LLM-based ingestion structuring does not pay off at query time.