--- title: "Local RAG Search · AssistantGeneral" description: "Hybrid search over your documents on your own machine: meaning plus keywords, a ranking model, relevance floors, diversity, recency and highlighted citations." url: "https://royalsoftworks.com/products/assistant-general/features/document-search/" source: "https://royalsoftworks.com" format: "markdown" note: "Markdown rendering of the HTML page at `url`. Same content, same canonical URL." --- Features · Your documents # Answers from your own files, with the page they came from. Hybrid search over your documents on your own machine: meaning plus keywords, a ranking model, relevance floors, diversity, recency and highlighted citations. [Editions](https://royalsoftworks.com/products/assistant-general/editions/): Every edition runs the full search. Changing its settings: Pro and up. ## Document search, feature by feature Each comes with a small drawing of how it works. They are diagrams, not screenshots; numbers in them are examples. - ### Meaning and words, together Every search runs by meaning and by exact words at once, and the two result lists are merged. For your IT team: Vector search plus full-text (BM25) on LanceDB, fused with Reciprocal Rank Fusion. Diagram: By meaning and By exact words come together as One merged list. - ### A second, sharper ranking A ranking model re-reads the best candidates against your question. Pick one of three, from about 22 MB to 545 MB, and its precision. For your IT team: Cross-encoders: bge-reranker-v2-m3 (multilingual), bge-reranker-base, ms-marco-MiniLM-L-6-v2; q4, q8 or fp32. Diagram: Top candidates → Ranking model → Best first. - ### "Not found" instead of a guess Passages below a relevance bar are dropped, and small talk is not looked up at all, so a greeting never arrives wrapped in random documents. Diagram: Passage, then “Relevant enough?”: yes, Used; no, Dropped. - ### A wider net, if you want one It can search with a short imagined answer, with added synonyms, or both. Final ranking is always against your real question. Diagram: Your question leads to Imagined answer, Synonyms, Both. - ### Not five copies of one page Results are spread across sources, and near-duplicate passages are dropped when a document is added. Diagram: Five from one file → Spread out → One each from five files. - ### Newer wins a tie Recent material gets a gentle boost that fades with age, using the date inside the document when it has one. You set the strength and the half-life. Diagram: The recency boost halves with every half-life of age. - ### Presets, with the reasons General, Legal and Technical each move many search settings at once, show what they would change before you apply them, and explain why. Diagram: Pick a preset → See what changes → Apply. - ### The exact sentence highlighted Citations highlight the passage that matched, not just the file. Diagram: Answer \[1\] → Source → Sentence highlighted. - ### Your question, not your instructions Sentences like "cite the source" or "be brief" are left out of the search, so they do not push the right passage down. Diagram: Question + “be brief” → Drop the instruction → Search the question. - ### Deep search One button sweeps everything the knowledge base knows about a subject, not just the top few passages. Diagram: One subject leads to Search 1, Search 2, Search 3. - ### Chunking you control How long each searchable piece is, and how much neighbouring pieces overlap, for documents added from then on. Timeline (Pieces of a set length, overlapping): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. ## Goes well with - [Collections](https://royalsoftworks.com/products/assistant-general/features/knowledge-collections/) - [Database priority](https://royalsoftworks.com/products/assistant-general/features/database-priority/) - [Search models](https://royalsoftworks.com/products/assistant-general/features/embedding-models/) [Previous Agents and skills](https://royalsoftworks.com/products/assistant-general/features/agents-and-skills/) [Next Collections](https://royalsoftworks.com/products/assistant-general/features/knowledge-collections/) [All 31 feature classes](https://royalsoftworks.com/products/assistant-general/features/)