Perceptive Enterprise Search scans your documents and stores information about each and every word that it finds in a special file called an index. The index is simply a list of the words used in the documents. When you search for a word, Perceptive Enterprise Search uses the index to find which documents contain that word. You can have multiple indexes, each covering a different part of your system, or you can have a single index covering all of your system.
Perceptive Enterprise Search does not need you to format your documents in any special way in order to index them. Perceptive Enterprise Search can read and index almost any type of word processing document and other formats, such as ASCII, ZIP, HTML, PDF, HTML email, and spreadsheet files. Your documents may be located on a local hard drive, a network drive, or on a website.
It is important to remember that the original documents do not have to be moved or copied for Perceptive Enterprise 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 index do not affect the original documents.