Vector search engines allow for semantic search of unstructured data by using machine learning to create vector embeddings of data and queries, enabling efficient similarity search at scale. Weaviate is an open source vector search engine that indexes and stores data objects and their vector embeddings, supporting real-time CRUD operations and approximate nearest neighbor search algorithms to retrieve similar results. It provides a modular pipeline for vectorization using pre-trained or custom ML models and can be interacted with via RESTful and GraphQL APIs.