The thing with tech is, if you're too early, it's not like you eventually get discovered and adopted.

When the time is finally right, people just "invent" what you made all over again.

Totally. And this has even happened in search. Open source search engines like Elasticsearch, etc did this... Google etc did this in the early Web days, and so on :)

Sorry, what is it that people in search _have_ known?

I know nothing about search, but a bit about ML, so I'm curious

That ranking is a lot more complicated than cosine similarity on embeddings