Research & Opinions

How to Create A Searchable Company Knowledge Base with Locusive's API

Locusive's API helps companies organize their documents and data in one searchable place. Easily add your files, webpages, and databases. Then find any information quickly with natural search. No more hunting across messy folders. Discover the data you need in seconds.
Shanif Dhanani
6.5 minutes

Finding and accessing the right information when you need it is a constant challenge for growing companies. A centralized knowledge base makes your company data easily discoverable and usable by your team. But if your data lives in silos across different apps and platforms, compiling it into one searchable base can be daunting.

Locusive's API solves this problem by providing powerful capabilities for ingesting, storing, and searching across all of your company's data assets in one place. You can integrate content from places like Google Drive, Google Sheets, Slack, and more.

The API's precision vector search ensures you can quickly find the exact information you need from your knowledge base.

In this guide, we'll explore how you can leverage Locusive's API to easily create a centralized, secure, and searchable knowledge base for your business.

Why Choose Locusive for Your Knowledge Base?

Locusive offers several key advantages that make it the ideal API for creating your company knowledge base:

Highlighting the Primary Features

  • Efficient and precise searching - Locusive's vector search capabilities allow you to instantly find the most relevant results for your queries across all of your documents and data sources. The vector search understands the contextual meaning behind your keywords, returning ultra-precise results instead of just matching keywords.
  • Integration capabilities with popular platforms - The API integrates seamlessly with Google Drive, Google Sheets, Slack, and many other platforms through pre-built connectors. This allows you to bring in data from across all of your company's apps and centralize it into Locusive.

Emphasis on Security and Compliance

Locusive utilizes enterprise-grade security and compliance standards to keep your business data safe, including:

  • Access controls, encryption, and data isolation to control access.
  • Compliance with regulations like CASA Tier 2.
  • Logical separation of client data and SSL transmission.

With Locusive's powerful search capabilities, deep integrations, simple interface, and security measures, it is the ideal choice for creating and managing your knowledge base.

Integrating Your Data

Locusive provides seamless integration with your data through both our user-friendly web interface and flexible API ingestion endpoint.

A. Using the Locusive Web App

The Locusive web app offers a couple easy ways to integrate your data:

  • Direct file uploads - Simply drag and drop your PDF docs directly into your Locusive account.
  • OAuth integration - Connect apps like Google Drive, Google Sheets, Notion, Salesforce, and many others to Locusive using OAuth. This allows the platform to automatically sync any changes or new content added to the connected sources.

The direct upload method works great for one-off additions of files. But leveraging OAuth integrations ensures your Locusive knowledge base stays continuously synchronized and any changes to source documents get ingested automatically.

B. Using the Locusive API Endpoint

For more advanced or programmatic ingestion, Locusive offers a flexible API endpoint.

  • Pass URL - You can pass in the URL to any publicly accessible webpage or document using the /documents endpoint. Locusive will crawl the page and extract the content, and will refresh its contents internally to ensure we capture any changes over time.
  • Pass raw content - Alternatively, you can pass in the raw text content of a document directly in the request body instead of a URL.

The API endpoint gives developers complete control to integrate content in whatever way fits your use case, like syncing new product manuals from a CMS or updating company policies from an HR system.

Searching and Retrieving Data

Once your knowledge base is populated, you can leverage Locusive's robust search capabilities to find precisely what you need.

A. Basic Search

  • Use the /documents/top_snippets endpoint to pass in any search query. Results will be returned ranked by relevance.
  • The system will return a JSON-encoded document snippet that contains the full details of the snippet of information from your document that matched your search request

B. Advanced Search

  • Filter results by setting the min_score parameter between 0 and 1 to require a higher relevance threshold (1 being "exact match")
  • Increase the number of results returned by setting the max_results parameter, ideal for broader queries.

C. Under the Hood: Vector Search

Locusive's search is powered by vector similarity algorithms. Here's how it works:

  • As content is ingested, Locusive encodes it into vectors representing semantic meaning.
  • Queries are also encoded into vectors.
  • Relevance is calculated by vector similarity. Results with higher vector similarity scores are ranked higher.

This vector search approach allows finding highly precise results based on meaning, not just matching keywords. This ensures the most relevant data is returned for each query.

Security and Compliance

Locusive implements robust security protections and compliance standards:

A. Enterprise-grade Security Measures

  • Strict access controls, encryption, and data isolation safeguard your business data.
  • Data access is restricted to only authorized users.

B. Compliance with Regulations

  • Locusive meets regulations including CASA Tier 2 for security.
  • This ensures your sensitive data meets industry governance standards.

C. Data Storage and Transmission

  • Client data is logically separated from others' data within Locusive's systems.
  • All data transmission occurs over secure SSL channels.
  • Uploaded files are only accessible via short-lived signed URLs that expire quickly.
  • Only metadata about documents is stored, not full document contents.

With its multilayered security approach, Locusive API provides peace of mind that your business knowledge base meets rigorous security and compliance requirements.

Case Study: GrantExec's Success with Locusive

GrantExec provides grant opportunity matching services for nonprofits, businesses, schools, and other organizations. They faced challenges efficiently matching thousands of grant programs to organizations' profiles.

Locusive's API provided the solution. By ingesting GrantExec's grants database and organization profiles into Locusive, precision vector search could quickly surface the most relevant grants for each organization.

According to GrantExec's CEO Ryan Alcorn:

"Locusive helped us improve the process of matching grant opportunities for our clients by taking the code that I had initially written, which was pulled together with glue and tape and by no means professional and transformed and optimized that process that, that script into something much more compelling, much faster and, and much more accurate."

The Locusive integration improved GrantExec's matching speed by 80-85%, enabling real-time matches. The Locusive Slack bot also opened new possibilities for conversational searching.

Overall, GrantExec achieved:

  • Faster, more accurate matching of grants to organizations
  • 80-85% improvement in process speed
  • New conversational search capabilities through the Slack bot integration

GrantExec had an excellent experience with Locusive's developer support and intends to continue expanding their use of Locusive's solutions. The dramatic improvements for their business highlight the power of Locusive's API for search and knowledge management.

Support, Documentation, and Further Learning

We offers several resources to help you get started and integrate Locusive's API:

  • The Locusive Developers Hub contains comprehensive documentation, REST API references, tutorials, and code examples. Everything you need to start building with Locusive.
  • You can reach out to the developer support team with any questions at [email protected]. We are happy to help with integrating Locusive or solving any issues.

With the extensive documentation and helpful support team, you'll have all the resources needed to successfully leverage our API for your knowledge base.

Start Building Your Knowledge Base with Locusive

Locusive's API provides the ideal solution for creating your company's centralized knowledge base. With our fast and accurate search, deep integrations, robust security, and simple interface, you get a powerful knowledge management platform.

By ingesting all your data sources into Locusive, you can discover and retrieve information faster than ever before. Vector search understands search context to deliver ultra-relevant results every time.

Schedule a demo today and start integrating your existing data sources in minutes. You have nothing to lose and efficient knowledge management to gain.