Search and Ask
Search and Ask work over every PDF in your library sidebar. They need the search extra (see
Installation).
- Search returns passages, each with its paper and page.
- Ask answers a question with verbatim quotes from your papers, each linked to its page, and a short response that cites only those quotes. When the papers do not answer it, Ask says so.
Opening a result shows the PDF at that page with the passage marked.
Index the papers
Section titled “Index the papers”- Open the search settings (the gear next to the search bar).
- Press Update index, or run
inscien index.
The first index downloads the search models once. Later updates read only new and changed papers.
Search and ask
Section titled “Search and ask”| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| Typing | Shows papers whose title matches |
| Enter | Runs the current mode, Search or Ask |
| Ctrl+Enter | Asks |
Settings
Section titled “Settings”| Setting | Values |
|---|---|
| Matching | Keyword, Semantic, or Hybrid (both combined) |
| Rerank | Off, Neural, or LLM |
| Results | How many passages to show |
| Per paper | At most this many passages from one paper |
| Years, Collection | Limit the search to a year range or a Zotero collection |
| Ask model, Ask passages | The Ollama model, and how many passages it reads |
Ask needs Ollama
Section titled “Ask needs Ollama”Ask and the LLM rerank use a local Ollama. They appear while Ollama is
running. The default model is qwen2.5:7b-instruct. Any model Ollama has can be chosen in the
settings.
ollama pull qwen2.5:7b-instruct