OK… here is a simple example of both:
Vector DB Search “Hello World?”
Basic Wildcard “LIKE” DB Search “Hello World”
Which is better?
For CMS search engines, there will be a lot of “bad matches” for short phrases because vectorized text must be around 300-500 tokens (or words, need to confirm) to provide a vector which is useful.
Most people doing a CMS or forum search will use much smaller search terms and the imprecision of using this type of vectorization search will return a lot of “useless” or “nonsense” search results (as in the practical example above).
We can improve this with larger search strings, but in general, we will not get better results than a full-text search; especially for a text-based CMS system of articles where users tend to do searches with short phrases and keywords.
In other words, as a systems engineer, I advise you NOT to worry abou overall system performance until you have actually implemented a vector-based search approach so you can see the search results yourself.
If you want to implement a vectorized search feature, just do it and worry about the performance issues AFTER you are happy (or not) with the search results. Don’t follow the hype, ChatGPT or trendy tech discussions, people trying to sell you a product or a consulting service; just “do it” by coding it yourself. It’s not hard to implement, as you have already mentioned @SomebodySysop .
Hope this helps.