Search Guide

The global palette (Ctrl/Cmd + K) searches file names, folder names, and document content across everything you can access. Inside a folder, the filter narrows the current listing. Inside an open document, the floating find bar searches that document and jumps to the matching page.

Results always respect your permissions and show the page where each hit lives, so you land on the exact spot.

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.

• The index covers extracted text from PDFs, Office files, OCR-processed scans, and text files.
• 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 section of the admin console. A scope is 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. A typed confirmation is required, 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.