Search

LLM Wiki — Search

Locate wiki pages by keyword. This is the retrieval substrate: it returns a ranked candidate set, not a synthesised answer. Use it to find the right pages, then read them (or hand them to query/synthesize) for the actual reasoning.

Unlike query, search does not compose an answer or guarantee citations — it ranks pages so you know where to look.

When to invoke

• The user wants to find or list pages by term, alias, or tag.
• An agent (claude-wiki-pages-analyst-agent) needs a candidate set before query, synthesize, or compile.

How to run

The engine owns the ranking so results are reproducible:

bash scripts/engine.sh search "<query>" --target <vault> --json

R1 candidate filters

Three optional flags prune the candidate page set before scoring. They compose with AND; absent flags match everything.

Flag	Behaviour
--type <T>	Keep only pages whose frontmatter type equals T exactly. Validation strategy: filter-only — the page-type enum is single-sourced in ontology-profile-v1 (skills/init/template/CLAUDE.md §Enum list); the engine carries no copy. An unknown T simply returns zero hits.
--folder <path>	Keep only pages whose vault-relative file path starts with <path>/ (path-prefix match; trailing slash normalised). Example: --folder wiki/ai restricts to wiki/ai/*.
--tag <tag>	Best-effort filter: keep only pages whose frontmatter tags list contains <tag> as an exact member. Precision only; tag-vocabulary validation is a later item (governed taxonomy).

# Only concept pages mentioning "retrieval":
bash scripts/engine.sh search "retrieval" --type concept --target <vault> --json

# Pages under wiki/ai/ only:
bash scripts/engine.sh search "retrieval" --folder wiki/ai --target <vault> --json

# Pages tagged "retrieval":
bash scripts/engine.sh search "retrieval" --tag retrieval --target <vault> --json

# Combined (AND): concept pages in wiki/ai/ tagged "retrieval":
bash scripts/engine.sh search "retrieval" --type concept --folder wiki/ai --tag retrieval --target <vault> --json

--json returns:

{
  "command": "search",
  "vault": "…",
  "query": "graph rag",
  "hits": [
    {
      "title": "Graph RAG",
      "wikilink": "[[Graph RAG]]",
      "file": "wiki/ai/graph-rag.md",
      "type": "concept",
      "score": 18,
      "snippet": "Graph RAG walks the knowledge graph…",
      "matched": [
        { "channel": "title-phrase", "term": "", "hits": 1, "points": 10 },
        { "channel": "title-term", "term": "graph", "hits": 1, "points": 5 },
        { "channel": "title-term", "term": "rag", "hits": 1, "points": 5 },
        { "channel": "body-term", "term": "graph", "hits": 3, "points": 3 }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

matched is the score breakdown: one MatchComponent per scoring site, sorted by points desc → channel (union literal order: title-phrase, title-term, alias-term, tag-term, body-term) → term lexicographic. Hard invariant: hit.score === hit.matched.reduce((s,m) => s+m.points, 0). JSON-only — the human text output (search without --json) does not emit it.

alias-term and graph-edge are reserved channel names (forward-compat for Phase 2 alias-tracking and graph-edge contributions); they are not emitted now.

Scoring is fixed and transparent: a title/alias phrase match outranks a per-term title match, which outranks a tag match, which outranks body-frequency hits (capped). Ties break alphabetically by title, so the ranking is stable.

If Bun is unavailable, fall back to Grep over vault/wiki/** and rank by hand using the same priority (title/alias > tag > body).

Output

• Report the top hits as [[wikilink]] so the user can open them directly.
• Every hit resolves to a real page — never invent titles.
• When the next step is a cited answer, escalate to /claude-wiki-pages:query.

Tier-2 deterministic recall

When a query term has no exact match in a page, the engine expands it before scoring using two deterministic mechanisms — no embeddings, no network, no ML.

Synonym lexicon (_vocabulary.md)

Place _vocabulary.md at the vault root (sibling of wiki/, outside wiki-scoped checks). The engine reads it at query time; humans curate it; the engine never writes it.

---
title: "Vault Vocabulary"
groups:
  - canonical: "automobile"
    variants: ["car", "auto", "motorcar"]
  - canonical: "machine learning"
    variants: ["ml", "machine-learning"]
---

A query for "car" will also match pages that contain "automobile", "auto", or "motorcar". Synonym matches score lower than exact matches (W_TERM_TITLE_SYNONYM=2 vs W_TERM_TITLE=5), so exact-match pages rank first.

The lexicon is filename-addressed (_vocabulary.md) — no type: frontmatter field is required and none is added to the page-type enum.

When _vocabulary.md is absent, search degrades silently to exact-only behavior (the pre-Tier-2 contract). The engine never throws on an absent lexicon.

Conceptual synonyms vs aliases: the aliases frontmatter field records known alternate names for a specific page (consumed page-side by titleHay). The lexicon records cross-page synonym classes consumed query-side. Ingest and curator record conceptual synonyms in aliases; the lexicon records vocabulary expansions. Do NOT copy aliases into the lexicon or vice versa.

Porter stemmer

The engine applies a pure Porter 1980 stemmer to each query term. A page whose title or body contains a morphological variant ("running" → stem "run", "ponies" → stem "poni", "caresses" → stem "caress") will be found even if the query uses the base form. Stem matches score at W_TERM_*_STEM=1 — lower than synonyms.

The stemmer is a pure TypeScript function: no data files, no network, no ML model. stem(stem(x)) === stem(x) (idempotent) and stem("")==="" (total).

Score invariant under expansion

score === matched.reduce((s,m) => s+m.points, 0) is preserved. Each synonym or stem match emits exactly one MatchComponent per (source query term, field) pair. De-duplication: if the source query term already scored a field exactly, the synonym/stem channel is suppressed for that (source, field) pair.

Channel order (including Tier-2)

title-phrase → title-term → alias-term → tag-term → body-term
→ synonym-term → stem-term

Exact channels precede Tier-2 channels so exact matches win ties.

R3 — Agent-vs-human retrieval contract

There are two consumption paths for search output. Both paths read the same ranking — there is one score object (R4's score + matched[]). Neither path re-ranks: R3 documents how each path consumes the results, not a second ranker.

Agent path (search --json)

The agent path is the machine-actionable contract. Agents (and the C1 budget-aware MOC descent in query) consume:

• score — the authoritative rank key; the only ordering key any consumer uses.
• matched[] — the full score breakdown: every channel that fired (title-phrase, title-term, alias-term, tag-term, body-term, synonym-term, stem-term, and the reserved graph-edge), with {channel, term, hits, points} per entry.
• wikilink — the [[wikilink]] form of the page title, ready to cite.

The agent path is deterministic: same query + same vault + same lexicon → byte-identical hits array, in the same order, with the same matched[] contents. This is what makes the output gate-testable and auditable.

Agents read matched[] as structured provenance ("why this page ranked"). matched[] is JSON-only — it is never emitted in the human text render; humans read a clean list.

Human path (text render, no --json)

The human path is the readable ranked list — a clean, scannable list of [[wikilinks]] with their scores:

 18  [[Graph RAG]]  (wiki/ai/graph-rag.md)
 13  [[Retrieval]]  (wiki/ai/retrieval.md)

No matched[] noise. Humans navigate the MOC and follow wikilinks; they do not need the per-channel score breakdown. The text render intentionally omits it.

One score object, one ranking

There is one score object (score + matched[]) emitted by the engine for each hit. Both the agent path and the human path read the same ranking — the agent gets the structured form, the human gets the rendered form. Neither path re-ranks: search emits one ordered hits array; consumers take a prefix or filter it, they never reorder it by a different key. This is the same JSON-only discipline R4 established.

R2 — --graph: deterministic link-walk (N≤2)

search --graph expands the keyword result set by walking the wikilink graph from each keyword hit. The expansion is opt-in, off by default, and uses the same deterministic engine — no vectors, no embeddings, no network.

What it does

After keyword+Tier-2 hits are computed, the engine calls the graph-traversal primitive (src/core/graph.ts) with all keyword-hit files as seeds. It walks the sources, related, and depends_on predicates up to N=2 hops. Pages discovered by the walk appear as additional hits (or augment existing hits if they were already keyword matches).

How to run

--graph is a boolean flag on the search command. Omit it for keyword-only search (the default); add it to expand along the wikilink graph:

# Keyword + graph expansion (N≤2 over sources/related/depends_on):
bash scripts/engine.sh search "retrieval" --graph --target <vault> --json

# Composes with the R1 candidate filters (filters apply to the keyword seeds):
bash scripts/engine.sh search "retrieval" --graph --type concept --target <vault> --json

Weights and channel order

Graph is the WEAKEST signal — hop-decayed, strictly below synonym/exact:

Signal	Weight	Channel
Direct title match	5	title-term
Synonym/stem match	2–1	synonym-term, stem-term
Graph hop-1	2	graph-edge
Graph hop-2	1	graph-edge

Channel order (last = weakest): title-phrase → title-term → alias-term → tag-term → body-term → synonym-term → stem-term → graph-edge.

graph-edge match component

Every graph-discovered hit carries a graph-edge component in matched[]:

{ "channel": "graph-edge", "term": "sources", "hits": 1, "points": 2 }

• term — the predicate that created the edge (e.g. "sources", "related", "depends_on").
• hits — the hop distance (1 or 2). Note: unlike other channels where hits is an occurrence count, on a graph-edge row hits carries the hop distance from the seed to this page.
• points — the hop-decayed weight (2 for hop-1, 1 for hop-2).

The hard score===sum(matched.points) invariant is preserved: every score+= is paired with a matched.push().

Bodyless new hits

Graph-only hits (pages discovered solely by the walk, with no keyword match) have snippet: "" — the engine never reads page bodies during traversal.

Determinism guarantee

Same vault + same query + same edges + same N → byte-identical output across runs. BFS processes frontier pages in sorted vault-relative path order, predicates in fixed edges array order, resolved targets in sorted title order. Nearest-hop dedup: a page reached at hop-1 is never re-recorded at hop-2.

Off-by-default guarantee

When --graph is absent, search is byte-identical to the pre-graph baseline. Zero graph code is observable on the default path.

Predicates walked

R2 uses the provenance/association core from ontology-profile-v1: sources, related, depends_on. Only these three predicates are followed. Fields outside the GraphEdge closed union (e.g. tags) are never traversed. contradicts/supersedes walking and N>2 are deferred to Phase 3.