Feature Update: AI-Powered Semantic Search Replaces Full-Text Search

In this release, we’re excited to announce a major upgrade to our search capabilities. Full-text search has been officially sunset, replaced by AI-powered semantic search, leveraging embeddings and vector search technology. This upgrade reflects our commitment to providing more relevant, insightful search results and strengthening data security for our users.

Benefits of AI-Powered Semantic Search

AI-powered semantic search brings a significant improvement in how users can find and understand content:

1. More Meaningful Results: Unlike traditional keyword-based search, semantic search understands the context and meaning behind queries. This enables you to find relevant information even if the exact keywords are not present in the content.

   • Example: Searching for “latest financial insights” with traditional full-text search might only return documents containing that exact phrase. With semantic search, results will include documents containing terms like “recent market analysis” or “current economic overview,” providing a richer and more contextually relevant set of results.

2. Enhanced Relevance and Context: By using AI embeddings, which capture the nuanced meanings of words and phrases, semantic search offers results that align with the user’s intent, reducing the need for multiple searches and refining workflows.

Security Advantages with AI-Powered Search

One of the primary reasons for this transition is to enhance data privacy and security. Our AI-powered search leverages advanced encryption measures to ensure that sensitive data remains protected at every step:

• Data Remains Encrypted: Unlike full-text search, which required partial data decryption for indexing, vector-based semantic search keeps your data encrypted throughout the entire process. The system only uses unencrypted data temporarily during the embedding process, ensuring that plaintext data is never stored, searched, or indexed.
• Reduced Exposure Risk: With AI embeddings created from securely encrypted content, data is accessible only to authorized users without risk of exposure through plaintext search indexes, aligning with Clear Ideas’ commitment to protecting your sensitive information.

This upgrade aligns with our security-first approach, maintaining strict data-at-rest encryption and SSL-based end-to-end encryption while also offering more advanced, AI-driven search capabilities.

Additional Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Enhanced AI Credit handing for free users
• General UI tweaks and bug fixes

AI Improvements

The AI Chat feature has seen further enhancements, including:

• More Reliable Source References
  We've improved AI Chat's ability to provide source references from your private data in a more consistent, reliable, and organized way.

• Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Capabilities
  AI Chat now breaks down user requests into topic components for more accurate retrieval from your private data. Requests that span multiple topic areas should see improved results and increased relevance. We've also enhanced AI's ability to request additional private data as the chat session evolves.

• Updated to the Latest LLMs
  AI Chat has been updated to leverage the latest foundational models from OpenAI.

AI-Enhanced Search

In addition to Clear Ideas' utilizes AI-powered semantic search to provide comprehensive and more meaningful results. Our AI search can help you discover additional relevant content.

For example, a full-text search for "Furry Dog" might not return results where the document says "Fuzzy Puppy." With AI search, related terms like "Furry Dog" and "Fuzzy Puppy" are recognized as similar, increasing the likelihood that both appear in the same results. AI-enhanced search is especially useful when few results are returned, as it typically generates more comprehensive results.

Additional Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Added the ability to automatically expire a site share after a specified number of days.
• Added an expiry indicator showing the expiration date for site users.
• Enhanced user group filtering to allow group-to-group comparisons in Analytics.
• Improved two-factor authentication with enhanced support for authenticator apps.
• Users can now adjust the width of the search results and AI Chat by dragging a handle, improving customization for a more personalized layout experience.

Site Templates

Sites can now be created using more than 100 templates. These templates have been specially design for various industry-specific use cases. They help you organize your information quickly and ensure that the information is comprehensive and aligns with best practices in various industry. The focus of the templates is on projects where external collaboration and a single source of truth is paramount.

To create a site with a template, select 'Templates' on the main menu. You can browse and preview templates. You can then select 'Create Site With Template' to create an empty site with the template. Of course you can still create your own empty site, or upload a zip file with your content organized.