Semantic Search

Ask your crawled solutions a question in plain English. Results are ranked by meaning, not keywords. Search runs inside your Dataverse environment.

Where to Find It

Search is a section of Solution Manager, titled Search and labelled "Ask in plain English". The Component Dashboard search box is a plain text filter on name and summary, so it works differently.

The Search panel in Solution Manager, with a question box, a scope dropdown, a Search button and a ranked list of matching components
The Search section appears once at least one component is indexed. On a new install, that means after you activate Cartographer, add a solution and run Crawl Now. Until then the section is hidden.

Asking a Question

  1. 1

    Type your question

    Write it the way you would ask a colleague, for example which flow emails customers when an order is late.

  2. 2

    Choose a scope

    The dropdown offers All solutions, or any one of the solutions you have added.

  3. 3

    Click "Search" or press Enter

    The ranked results appear under the box.

Two questions that worked

Both of these returned the expected component when tried on a crawled solution.

  • "who is allowed to read records" returned the Cartographer Reader security role.
  • "what runs by itself on a timer" returned the scheduled crawl flow.

What is searched

Each component's name and its summary. See Summaries for how summaries are written.

Reading the Results

Search shows the top 10 matches, ranked by meaning. Each result shows:

  • Name. The component's name.
  • Type. What kind of component it is.
  • Solution. The solution that owns it.
  • Percentage. How similar the component is to your question.
  • Summary. The component's summary, clipped to 400 characters.

Under the list, a line reads "Searched N indexed component(s)." If the same component is tracked under two solutions, it appears once.

The percentage is the raw similarity between the component and your question. Good answers often score between 25 and 50 percent, so read the order of the list and ignore how large the number is. There is no warning when the best match is a weak one.

Results are text only. To see more about a component, find it by name in the Component Dashboard and open its detail panel.

Keeping Search Up to Date

Search only finds components that have been indexed. Indexing happens in your browser, from Solution Manager.

Crawl Now

After the crawl, the page indexes every component that has not been indexed yet, one at a time. The button shows a progress count while it works. Keep the page open until it finishes. Anything left unindexed is picked up by the next Crawl Now.

Rebuild search index

Found in the More actions menu on the solution's row. Recomputes the solution's search entries without crawling. Run it when a component's summary has changed, because a changed component keeps its earlier search entry until you do.

Rebuild everything

Also in the More actions menu. Re-reads every component, regenerates every summary, then re-indexes everything. Run it after upgrading Cartographer.

Each solution row shows where it stands, with one of three labels: "searchable", "N searchable" or "not searchable yet".

Scheduled crawls update your documentation but do not index for search. The next Crawl Now does.

How It Works and What It Sends

Search uses a small open-source embedding model, all-MiniLM-L6-v2, released under the Apache License 2.0. It is about 22 MB and ships inside the Cartographer solution. It runs in the Dataverse plug-in sandbox of your own environment.

The model makes no network calls and writes no text. It turns each component's name and summary, and your question, into numbers, then compares them. Your questions and the results stay in your environment, and search sends no usage report. The privacy policy lists what Cartographer does send to VerseBlocks.

Limits

  • English works best, because the model and the summaries are in English.
  • Search can only find what a summary describes. It does not search source code, raw metadata or your records.
  • It returns 10 results at most.
  • There is no confidence threshold, so a weak match still shows up.
Search results are only as current as the last indexing. After a solution changes, run Crawl Now, then Rebuild search index if a summary changed.