How Intric searches your documents

Most tools treat a document as a pile of text and match words against it. Intric works through the document first, so it knows what it’s holding before anyone asks — and when you do ask, it blends several ways of looking depending on what the question needs.

What happens when you add a document

Reading the page as a page

Intric reads a page as a page, not as a stream of words. A heading belongs above its table, a caption belongs below its chart, columns are read left to right. Where a page carries a diagram or an infographic rather than text, Intric describes what the image shows and keeps that description alongside the rest — nothing is quietly dropped.

Summarising the document

Before any question is asked, Intric already has a sense of what each file is about. That’s how it knows which file to open when you ask something — much like a colleague who remembers roughly what’s in each report before walking to the shelf.

Indexing for navigation

The document is stored in a way that lets Intric move through it in order, page by page, the way you’d flip through a book.

How a question is answered

When you ask a question, Intric weighs up several ways of looking and blends whichever suit the question. You don’t choose — it decides.

Keyword search

For exact matches — a case number, a name, a specific regulation — Intric prioritizes word-for-word matching.

Semantic search

For meaning rather than wording. Ask about “the risks of working night shifts” and it also finds a section on “health effects of irregular schedules,” because it’s matching concepts, not terms.

Reading the whole document

For tasks that need the full picture, such as summarizing a short report.

Navigational reading

For finding a place and then following it. Ask about chapter eight, and Intric locates where that chapter starts, then reads forward until it has seen everything it needs.

A precise factual question might lean mostly on keyword matching with some semantic search alongside it; a broad, conceptual question might be answered almost entirely semantically. In practice, these are blended rather than chosen one at a time.

Why answers carry references

Every answer is traceable back to its source. You can see which document, which page, and which passage the assistant drew on, and open it to check. That’s what makes it possible to rely on an answer rather than take it on faith — the reference is the point, not a footnote.

Why the original file matters

This is also why it matters that the assistant has the original file. References point into the document you uploaded, so the closer that file is to the real thing, the more useful the reference is. An exported or converted version of a document — plain text pulled from the legacy knowledge system, for instance — won’t give you references as reliable as the original PDF or Word file would.