Phonemos follows two approaches to search & find in parallel.

1. Within Phonemos, the search bar offers a plethora of search options, surpassing the capabilities of most systems.

2. To easily realise your enterprise search needs over your entire ecosystem, Phonemos MCP server can be integrated into your company LLM to let your AI chatbot find, retrieve and use your data from Phonemos - of course respecting the individual users priviledges.

This documentation page covers the first feature. Refer to <MCP server> to get information on the latter feature.

Content of the search index

The search system is capable to find nearly every type of object you have stored in Phonemos and has a fine grained relevance prioritization system to figure out, what to display first. Content searched includes:

• Wiki pages, in all language versions curated and including historic versions

• All other object names, e.g. filenames of files in filestacks or zone names

• Metadata text fields

• The contents of Text, Office or PDF files, see Index Word and PDF files for search

• The text contents extracted from image files, see Index OCR-based text recognition in embedded images for search

Search methods

Phonemos provides three search methods:

• Full text search

• Title-only search

• Semantic search

Full text search and search syntax

In order to search for a term, just enter it in the search bar.

To refine your search, you may use a specialized search syntax. Find help on this in the search menu.

• Multiple words: all words must be present
  Example: apple banana

• Quotes: exact phrase, words must follow directly one after another
  Example: "apple pie"

• OR: one of the two words must appear
  Example: apple OR banana

• Minus: word with preceding minus must not appear
  Example: apple -banana

• Star: words beginning with this character sequence
  Example: super* hero

Title-only search

If you want to ignore content and only search within the names of objects, use the title-only search. Activate it by starting your search term with a preceding # or use the menu to select this mode.

Semantic search

Phonemos uses AI to analyze your contents and build up search vectors that allow you to not just match keywords, but actual meaning. This will not just find text containing your search terms, but other content that cover similar subjects, uses synonyms etc.

To use semantic search, either switch the search mode using the search menu or precede your search terms with ~.

Prerequisite for this feature is that we connect Phonemos to an LLM system that supports this feature (so called “vector embeddings”). As we will need to transfer content to this LLM service, we need your opt-in to activate this feature in your site settings. We have a default LLM for embeddings in Phonemos cloud systems, but can support an LLM of your choice. Please read Our approach to AI to find out, why our flexible approach to AI is an important distinguishing feature and how you get the setup you actually need.

Advanced filters

Use the search menu to further restrict your search results, e.g. only search certain locations or object types.