Glossary category
Search and knowledge
How AI finds and uses your information.
18 terms
Before answering, the system searches a chosen set of documents, then writes its reply from what it found.
A way of representing text (or images) as a long list of numbers so that similar meanings end up numerically close together.
A database built to store embeddings and find the closest matches quickly, even across millions of documents.
Search that matches on meaning rather than on the exact words typed, so a query about annual leave finds the holiday policy.
The defined set of documents an assistant is allowed to answer from: policies, manuals, past tickets, whatever you have chosen to load.
- Chunking
Cutting long documents into passages small enough to search and feed to a model, which quietly decides how good the answers will be.
- Data ingestion
Getting your documents into a system so they can be searched, including the connectors, permissions and refresh schedule that keeps them current.
- Document parsing
Reading a file's real structure, its headings, tables and columns, so that meaning survives instead of collapsing into a wall of text.
- Hybrid search
Combining keyword matching with meaning-based search, so exact terms such as part numbers still land while related wording is also found.
- Keyword search
Matching the words as typed, which is precise for names and codes and unhelpful when the reader phrases things differently.
- Knowledge graph
A map of how things relate to each other, such as which customer owns which contract, letting a system answer joined-up questions.
- Enterprise search
Search across every system an organisation uses at once, returning cited answers and showing each person only what their access allows.
- Search index
The prepared copy of your content that search actually reads, which is why newly added documents take a while to become findable.
- Metadata
The facts about a document rather than its contents, such as owner, date and department, used to filter results and enforce access.
- Answer engine
A product that replies with a written answer and its sources instead of a list of links, now a category of its own.
- Passage level citation
A citation pointing at the exact passage an answer came from, rather than the whole document, so a claim can be checked quickly.
- Permission aware search
Search that respects who is allowed to see what, so the same question returns different results for different people.
- Retrieval pipeline
The full path from your documents to a grounded answer, covering ingestion, chunking, search and what is finally handed to the model.
Last checked July 2026