search

---

title: Search type: concept

Search

Search is full-text via SQLite's FTS5 extension. Every concepts/pages body and title is indexed; queries return ranked results with snippets.

What you can query

mcp server          # AND of two tokens
"mcp server"        # exact phrase
backlinks           # single token
arch*               # prefix match

The architecture/web-ui search box uses this on submit (Enter). It also live-filters the sidebar list and the graph view as you type — see concepts/wikilinks for the equivalent token semantics in the graph.

Why SQLite FTS5

• In-process. No separate Elasticsearch, no sidecar daemon, no extra port to manage. See design/lightweight.
• Standard. SQLite is everywhere; the index file is portable.
• Fast enough. Handles tens of thousands of pages with sub-millisecond queries.
• Phrase + prefix + boolean out of the box.

In the agent interface

Agents call agents/mcp-tools with the same query syntax. Results come back as {path, title, snippet} triples. See agents/workflows for typical patterns ("look up before write," "search-then-link").

Implementation

See architecture/index-and-search for how the FTS5 virtual table is maintained alongside the canonical pages table.