Results: passages, cited answers and "not found"
What comes back from a search, and how you check it against the file.
A search returns passages. An answer is a short text written only from those passages, with citations. When your files don't support an answer, the result is "not found".
Passages
A passage is a part of one file, up to 2,000 characters long. A search returns up to 10 passages, the ones nearest to your question first. A search ranks passages without deciding whether they answer the question; see "Not found".
| Each passage has | What it is |
|---|---|
| The text | The words of the passage, as ByteRover read them from the file. Formatting is dropped, and a spreadsheet row is read as cells separated by tabs. |
| The place | The page of a PDF, the slide of a presentation, or the sheet of a spreadsheet. |
| The heading path | The headings above the passage, from the top level down. Example: Refunds > European Union. Where headings come from depends on the file type; see Files. |
| The text around it | Up to 300 characters before the passage and up to 300 after. |
| The document and its revision | The drive and file the passage is in, and the revision that was searched. |
| Its position | Where the passage starts and ends in the text ByteRover read from the file, so you can read around it. |
| A score | The value results are ranked by. Only compare scores within a single search. |
By default you get one passage per file, so a single long file can't fill the list. You can ask for more than one passage from the same file; see Search.
Cited answers
A cited answer is for readers who want a sentence rather than a list. You get it in the app, on the Ask page, which runs a search and writes the answer from that search's passages and from nothing else. Agents and the API get passages only; they have no answer tool and no answer call.
The EU refund rules are in the customer refund policy, under Refunds > European Union. Customers have 14 days to cancel. [1]
An answer comes in sections, each with a heading and paragraphs. A sentence carries the numbers of the passages it uses, and a sentence that only joins others, with no fact from a file, carries none. Every answer cites at least one passage. To check a sentence, open the passage and read it in the file.
"Not found"
"Not found" is a result, not an error. It tells you the answer isn't in the files that were searched, and ByteRover doesn't fill the gap with a guess.
When a question starts from a wrong assumption and the passages the search found state the opposite, the answer reports what those passages state. "Not found" means the passages the search found don't state what the question asks for.
| You asked for | What you get when your files do not answer |
|---|---|
| A cited answer | The outcome is not_found and there's no answer text. This is the clear signal. |
| Passages (a search) | The passages nearest to your question. A search ranks passages without deciding whether they answer the question, so the list is empty only when nothing in the drives is near the question. |
When you need a clear yes or no, ask for a cited answer in the app. An agent or a program that works with passages makes the call itself: it reads them and says your files don't answer the question when none of them does.
If you get "not found":
- Check that the file is in a drive you searched and that its status is Searchable.
- Ask again using the words the file uses.
- If the file doesn't exist, add it. Team admins can see the questions that found nothing on the Usage page.
Languages
You can ask in any language, and your files can be in any language too. The published benchmark measures English.
Where you use it
- In the app: Ask a question and read the result.
- With an agent: the
searchandreadtools. - With the API: Search, which returns passages.