term
stringRequires an exact salient term to be present — the needle that semantic search would smooth away.
Semantic retrieval is excellent at meaning and terrible at identifiers. An error code, a CVE number, a part number or a case citation has no useful neighbourhood in embedding space; it either appears or it does not.
term is a hard lexical requirement layered on top of the query, and it is backed by a guarantee: an exact identifier that is in the index stays findable, and will not quietly disappear as the corpus is compacted.
Example
curl -H "x-api-key: $UNLOB_API_KEY" \
"https://api.unlob.com/search?q=disk+full&term=ENOSPC"Common questions
What does the term filter do?
Requires an exact salient term to be present — the needle that semantic search would smooth away.
When should I use term?
Error codes, identifiers, version strings, citations — anything where an approximate match is a wrong match.
How does term behave in practice?
`term` is a hard lexical requirement layered on top of the query, and it is backed by a guarantee: an exact identifier that is in the index stays findable, and will not quietly disappear as the corpus is compacted.
Filters are free
Every filter is evaluated against a stored field, so it narrows the candidate set before scoring — a filtered query is often faster than an unfiltered one.