• Connectors provide access to your data source (files, records), converts them into Exalead CloudView documents, and then sends them to Exalead CloudView for indexing. Connectors use the Push API (PAPI), a simple HTTP API to feed the index with documents. Each connector relies on the data source's native protocol to connect to its information source.

• Convert allows Exalead CloudView to read documents with various formats (such as PDF, XML, or Microsoft Word). It receives documents from connectors, extract text and field information from them, and pass that information along for indexing and storage in the index.

• Corpus refers to the collection of documents, coming from one or several data sources that needs to be indexed.

• Documents can be defined as all the objects to be indexed by Exalead CloudView, regardless of file or entity type in the data source. For example, HTML, JPG or CSV files, database records are all considered documents within Exalead CloudView, since they are all converted into a Exalead CloudView-specific document format (also known as a PAPI document) after being scanned by a connector.

• Document metas, not to be confused with hit metas, are pieces of text belonging to a document that have associated values, such as title or size. Document metas are stored either as an index field or as a category. Context is sometimes used as a synonym for document meta.

• Dictionary is a separate structure from the index that stores all the words from an indexed document, plus their number of occurrences in the corpus. It is used for linguistic expansion mechanisms such as spell-checking or regular expression matching.

• Facets are used to narrow search results. Use them to drill down into an area, such as language, author, or file type. They are typically used in dashboard analytics widgets, or in the Refinements panel for enterprise search.

• Hit metas, not to be confused with document metas, are used to display one or more retrievable index fields in the hit content of search results.

• Index is an efficient structure used by Exalead CloudView to store information about the items it has analyzed. When users issue search queries, Exalead CloudView quickly and easily finds the results within this structure.

• The Exalead CloudView index is divided into fields:

◦ Each field has a type: alphanumeric, numeric, hierarchical categories, geographic, and so forth.

◦ Each field can be defined as:

▪ Searchable which means that user search queries can be applied to this field.

▪ Retrievable which means that the field can be displayed in the search results.

• Queries are the search requests sent to the Exalead CloudView search engine and processed according to a specified search logic.

• Thumbnails are small image previews for documents, which can be displayed in the search results. They are computed at search-time and kept in the browser cache for one week.