Ask Pyron a question the way you would put it to a colleague — "which reports mention safety concerns" — and it looks for entries that are about what you mean, not only the ones that contain those exact words. Meaning-based matching runs alongside ordinary keyword search, so a single search covers both.
Keyword vs meaning
Search looks through your entries two ways at once. Keyword matching finds entries that contain the words you typed — a site name, an asset number, a phrase copied out of a report. It is exact: the word has to be there for the entry to match.
Meaning-based matching — sometimes called semantic search — goes further. It finds entries that are about what you asked, even when they are worded differently. A search for "safety concerns" can surface an entry that describes a near-miss or a hazard without ever using those two words, because the ideas sit close together in meaning.
You do not pick between the two. One search runs both and returns a single list, and an entry that matches both ways appears once rather than twice. Each result shows a short snippet of the entry and where it is filed in the tree, so you can tell the right one apart at a glance. Open a result and you land on the Entries page with that entry selected, ready to read in full.
Results only ever include entries you are allowed to open, so two people searching the same words can see different results depending on which parts of the tree they can reach. To open the search box from anywhere, see Quick search.
When semantic search is available
Meaning-based matching depends on your organisation's entries being indexed for meaning — a background step that prepares your data so a search can compare ideas, not only words. When that indexing is in place, your questions match entries by meaning as well as by keyword.
If your organisation has not set up that indexing, keyword search still works as usual: you can find an entry by the words it contains. Meaning-based matching is the part that stands down, and Pyron tells you so rather than quietly leaving it out.
When meaning-based matching is unavailable, a search that turns up little is telling you that nothing has been indexed for meaning yet — not that nothing matches. Read it as "there is nothing to compare against", then fall back on keyword search or reword what you are looking for.
The assistant searches your entries the same way when you ask it a question. If meaning-based matching is unavailable, it treats an empty answer as inconclusive rather than as proof that no entry fits. To learn how it draws on your entries, see the assistant.