Search Guide

Aegis Secure View indexes text from PDFs, Office files, images processed by the OCR add-on, and plain-text files. The index lives on the server, so search results respect your permissions: if you are not allowed to read a document, it will not appear in your results.

You can search in two ways. The global palette (Ctrl/Cmd + K) searches filenames and folder names across the VFS. Switch to full-text mode and it searches inside the content, ranking results by relevance and showing the exact page for each hit.

• Fuzzy matching tolerates typos and minor spelling differences.
• Results include the file name, page number, and a short snippet around the match.
• Click a result to open the document directly at the matched page.

Administrators define indexing scopes from the Search Engine section of the admin dashboard. A scope is essentially a folder or path prefix that tells the indexer which documents to crawl and which to ignore.

Each scope shows its progress: how many documents were detected, how many are already indexed, and how many workers are assigned. You can scale workers from 1 to 16 depending on how much CPU and I/O the server can spare.

• Add a scope by picking a folder directly from the VFS.
• Index rules use strict-prefix include/exclude lists so only intended paths are crawled.
• Delete a scope to stop indexing that path; it does not delete the documents themselves.

The Search Manager dashboard gives you a high-level view of the index health. The numbers you care about are detected files, indexed files as a percentage, critical failures, and the count of files that fell back to no-text mode.

A healthy index steadily approaches 100% of detected documents. If the percentage stalls, look at the failure audit before adding more workers.

• Detected files — documents the indexer knows about in the configured scopes.
• Indexed files — documents whose text has been extracted and stored in the index.
• Critical failures — documents that could not be indexed because of corruption, encryption, or unsupported formats.
• No-text / fallback — documents that simply contain no extractable text layer, such as image-only PDFs without OCR.

Not every file can be indexed. The failure audit groups documents by the reason they were skipped:

• Encrypted — the file is password-protected or uses certificate encryption the indexer cannot unlock.
• Corrupt — the file header or structure is damaged and the parser cannot read it.
• Timeout — extraction took longer than the configured threshold; you can retry with more workers or a longer timeout.
• Unsupported — the format is not one the indexer knows how to parse.
• No text — the document is image-only or its text layer is missing; run it through the Aegis OCR add-on if you need it searchable.

If the index becomes inconsistent — for example, after a bulk import where many files changed paths — administrators can reset the text index from Global Settings. This requires typing RESET as a confirmation, because the action is destructive.

After a reset, the indexer starts fresh and rescans every configured scope. Depending on repository size, this can take minutes or hours, so plan it during a maintenance window.

Good search is what turns a document vault into a usable archive. If you want to see full-text search running on your own files, request a demo.