Semantic Search and Your Data
Lore has two kinds of search. Keyword search runs entirely on Lore's own servers — nothing in your knowledge base is sent anywhere. Semantic search — search by meaning rather than by exact words — cannot work that way. It needs a language model to turn text into vectors, and Lore does not run language models. So on accounts with semantic search, some knowledge base text is sent to a third party to be processed. This page explains exactly what, exactly when, and exactly to whom, so the trade is yours to make with the facts in hand.
Where Your Account Stands
As of 15 August 2026, semantic search is the standard search on Lore accounts — it was enabled for all existing accounts on that date, because measured on real knowledge bases it finds what keyword search misses (paraphrases, synonyms, questions phrased in your own words). Newly created accounts start on keyword search and are switched on as part of onboarding.
If you would rather your content never left Lore's servers, ask and your account goes back to keyword-only search — from that moment nothing in the rest of this page applies to it, and no content leaves at any point. Vectors already computed stay inside your encrypted knowledge base file like any other column; what was previously sent for processing cannot be unsent, which is why this page is explicit about what is sent and when.
What Is Sent, and When
With semantic search on, text leaves Lore's servers at two moments and no others.
When an entry is written or updated
The headings and bodies of all of that entry's sections are sent together to be turned into vectors — the model indexes an entry as one document, so changing any one section re-sends its siblings. This happens when your AI creates or edits an entry, and once in bulk when semantic search is first enabled for your account, to index what is already there.
When you or your AI runs a meaning-based search
The search query is sent, along with the text of the candidate sections that matched, so the results can be ordered by relevance. Each candidate goes with its entry's name, type and description, which the ranking step reads alongside the section. An exact-word search sends nothing — it is answered entirely from Lore's own index.
Who Receives It
VoyageAI, a United States company, over an encrypted (TLS)
connection. Lore uses two of their models: voyage-context-3 to produce the vectors and
rerank-2.5 to order results. VoyageAI's handling of the text it receives is governed by
their own terms and privacy policy, not by Lore's — if that matters to your decision, read theirs
before enabling this.
What Stays Inside Lore
- The vectors come back and stay put. The numerical vectors VoyageAI returns are written into your encrypted knowledge base like any other column, and are never sent to anyone else — the only place they go is into an export you download yourself, where they are included unless you leave them out.
- Everything else stays. Your tags, statuses, sources, timestamps, entry IDs and knowledge base configuration are never part of any request. Entry names, types and descriptions leave only at ranking time, as part of a candidate's document; they are never sent when an entry is indexed.
- Entries that never change are indexed once. An entry's sections are re-sent for indexing only when one of them changes, or when the embedding model is upgraded and the index has to be rebuilt. A section that comes up as a candidate in a search by meaning is sent again at that moment, as described above.
- Your content is never logged. A single module in Lore's codebase is permitted to make these requests, and it is written so that neither your content nor the API credential is written to any log, including error logs.
Turning It Off
Switching an account back to keyword search takes effect on the very next request — no waiting period and no redeploy. From that moment nothing further is sent. Vectors already stored stay inside your encrypted database, where they are inert; they are reused if you ever switch back on, and removed with the rest of your data if you delete your account.
There is also a switch above the per-account one: Lore can be run with no VoyageAI credential configured at all, which makes these requests impossible process-wide, for every account, regardless of individual settings.
If It Fails, Search Still Works
Semantic search is an addition to keyword search, not a replacement for it. If VoyageAI is unreachable or returns an error, that search silently falls back to keyword results rather than failing — and the response tells your AI that it did, so it can say so rather than quietly presenting weaker results as though they were the best available.
The Short Version
- Semantic search is the standard search on Lore accounts as of 15 August 2026; keyword-only remains available on request.
- On keyword-only search, no knowledge base content is sent to any third party, ever.
- With semantic search on, section text is sent to VoyageAI when entries change, and queries plus candidate section text (each with its entry's name, type and description) are sent when you search by meaning.
- Nothing else is sent, nothing is logged, and switching off takes effect immediately for everything from that moment on.
If anything here is unclear, or you want your account switched to keyword-only search, get in touch — this is exactly the kind of trade-off worth a conversation.