Perceptive Search reads your documents and stores information about every word that it finds in special files called indexes. The index is simply a list of the words used in the documents. When you search for a word, Perceptive Search uses the index to find which documents contain that word. You can have multiple Perceptive Search indexes, each covering a different part of your system, or you can have a single index covering all of your system.
Perceptive Search does not need you to format your documents in any special way in order to index them. It can read and index almost any type of word processing document and other formats such as ASCII, ZIP, HTML, PDF, email and spreadsheet files. Your documents may be located on a local hard drive, a network drive, CD/DVD, or in a database, emails, website or other data resource.
It is important to remember that the original documents do not have to be moved or copied for Perceptive Search to index them. The index is merely a "contents listing" of the documents, and your documents are not altered in any way. Changes made to an Perceptive Search index do not affect the original documents.
Each index represents a 'snapshot' of the contents of the documents indexed. If documents are added, changed or deleted, the index needs to be updated on a regular basis to keep the 'snapshot' up-to-date. You can schedule updates to occur regularly.