Answer search
Ask this site a question
Type a question and get the answer passage that answers it, with the page it came from, its evidence grade and the date it was last reviewed. The answer is quoted from the site, never generated, and your question never leaves this page.
A description of a feature on this site, so the primary source is the code that implements it — served unminified at the link below for exactly that reason.
Loading the answer index…
How does this search work?
It ranks every answer passage on this site against your question using BM25, a standard relevance formula, and shows you the best match in full along with its source, evidence grade and last-reviewed date. The whole index is a static file your browser downloads once; the matching happens on your device.
It quotes. It does not write. Every word you get back came off a page on this site, and the link next to it goes straight there.
Why it quotes instead of summarizing
A generated summary would read more smoothly, and it would break the one thing this site is for.
A model rewriting three passages into one smooth paragraph gives you text that nobody actually wrote and nobody checked. The smoothness makes it more convincing than the sourced version, not less. So you get the real sentence and the page it came from.
So the trade is deliberate: you get slightly rougher output with a verifiable chain behind every sentence.
What it cannot do
Stated plainly, because a search box that silently fails at something is worse than one that says so:
- It does not understand your question. It matches words, with stemming and relevance weighting. Ask it something phrased very differently from how the site phrases it and it may miss.
- It cannot combine two pages. If your question needs half an answer from one page and half from another, it will show you the better half and the other page underneath, rather than merging them.
- It cannot answer what the site does not cover. The subjects deliberately left out are listed by name in the specification. It will tell you it found nothing rather than stretch.
- It needs JavaScript. Without it, this page is a form that reloads and explains itself. Every page remains reachable from the library and the glossary.
What happens to your question
Nothing. There is no endpoint, no API key, no logging and no analytics on this page or any other page of this site. The index is a static JSON file served like any other file, and the matching runs in your browser.
That is not a privacy promise you have to take on trust. The script is served unminified at /assets/js/search.js and you can read it.