Ask HN: GPT vs. straight-up index / search

Hi HN,

I'm a hobbyist and an amateur in the field of programming. I've got my mind set on generating a set of Q/A pairs to finetune a transformer on, but this got me wondering - If I just "index" this knowledge base and enable a sort of fast search over it, that would probably be good enough for my needs.

Now, the issue is that I barely know what an inverted index is, and my knowledge of programming usually breaks on a bit more advanced web app architecture where you start implementing a search for products etc. (tutorial level ELO)

Any help, tips, guides? Thanks!