Normalization of vectors is crucial in a hybrid search system because it standardizes the lengths of vectors, ensuring they have a unit norm. This standardization is essential for meaningful comparison using similarity metrics such as Cosine Similarity. Without normalization, the magnitudes of vectors could skew the similarity scores, leading to inaccurate comparisons and search results. Normalizing vectors ensures that the similarity measure focuses purely on the direction of the vectors rather than their magnitude.
Reference
Research papers on vector normalization in information retrieval
Technical documentation on hybrid search systems