Evaluating plycdn
This page is for people, and for the coding assistants they use, who are checking plycdn against a list of requirements. Each capability is marked Yes, Partly or No, with a link to where it is described. The limits are stated plainly. Everything here is what the product does today.
1Search and ranking
| Capability | Answer | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Search by meaning and by wording in one request | Yes | Every search combines both. matchType says which way each result was found. How search ranks |
| A re-ranking step on search | Yes | The strongest candidates are re-ordered by reading the question and the passage together. It applies to every search and has no per-request switch. How search ranks |
| Weighting between meaning and wording that you can tune | No | The balance is fixed. |
| A relevance score and a confidence band on every result | Yes | relevance, confidence and matchType. How well a passage matched |
| Weak matches withheld, and counted | Yes | withheldAsWeak tells an empty library from a library with no good match. How well a passage matched |
| Ask in one language, find a passage in another | Yes | English questions can find Hindi passages. We do not publish accuracy figures per language. Languages |
| Filters on collections, metadata, dates, speaker and language | Yes | Narrowing a search |
| Narrowing step by step, and searching chosen documents | Yes | Narrowing step by step |
| Synonyms and boosts | Partly | Growth and Enterprise. Synonyms belong to an organization, not to a collection; boosts match on metadata or kind, with no recency decay. Tuning relevance |
| Suggestions as someone types | Yes | Suggesting queries as someone types |
| Related content for a file | Yes | At file level. Finding related content |
| A report of searches that found nothing | Yes | withoutResults, and the dashboard's Search analytics page. Seeing what people search for |
| A playground to try queries | Yes | The dashboard's Search page shows passages, scores, how each matched, and the answer. Try it in the dashboard first |
| Per-query logs with every returned passage and stage timings | No | Search analytics counts and lists queries; it does not record each result. |
| Saved test sets of question and expected passage | No | |
| Search request deadline you set | No |
2Answers
| Capability | Answer | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Written answers with numbered citations | Yes | Each citation names the file and the page or moment. Answering a question |
| Exact quoted span and character offsets inside a citation | Partly | A citation carries the passage excerpt and its location (the page, and character offsets of the passage). It does not mark the exact sentence the answer relied on. |
| An explicit "nothing found, no answer" | Yes | answer is null with no citations; in a stream answered is false. Answering a question |
| Answers in the language of the question | Yes | Snippets and quotes stay in the language of the source. Answering a question |
| Follow-up questions and streaming | Yes | Follow-up questions |
| Answers written from whole documents | No | An answer is written from the best-matching passages. |
| Choosing the answer model or bringing your own key | No | |
| Summaries, comparison across documents, entity extraction | No | |
| Counting or adding up figures in spreadsheets | No | Rows are searched as text. |
3Files and parsing
| Capability | Answer | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, text, Markdown, HTML and SCORM packages | Yes | What can be indexed |
| Video and audio, transcribed with timestamps | Yes | What can be indexed |
| PowerPoint | No | Neither .ppt nor .pptx. Export the deck to PDF and register that. |
Older Office files (.doc, .xls) |
No | Convert them to .docx and .xlsx. |
| Scanned documents and images (OCR) | No | A PDF with no text at all fails with ocr_required. A PDF with some picture-only pages indexes its text pages and lists the others as warnings. Images are not an accepted format. |
| Tables, columns and headings recognised in PDFs | No | A PDF is read page by page and split by length, about 200 words a passage. |
| Section heading on each result | Partly | Word and HTML files carry the nearest heading; PDFs carry the page. |
| Table rows returned with their column headers | No | |
| Fetching the passages around a hit | No | |
| Reading back the text extracted from a document | No | Recordings have a readable, correctable transcript; documents do not. |
| Text shown on screen in recordings | Yes | Growth and Enterprise. Reading text shown on screen |
| Re-indexing in place, with versions | Yes | A new sourceVersion makes a new revision, and the old one stays searchable until the new is ready. A list of past revisions is not offered. Registering content |
4Getting content in
| Capability | Answer | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Register a file by address, with a retry-safe key | Yes | Idempotency-Key and externalId. Registering content |
| Bulk registration | Yes | Up to 100 files in one call. Registering many at once |
| Following progress of indexing | Yes | By job state. Following progress |
| A webhook when a file has been indexed | No | Webhooks cover video and live streams. Read the job state instead. |
| Sync from S3-compatible storage (Google Cloud Storage included), Azure Blob and Canvas | Yes | Enterprise. Syncing from storage you already run |
| Sync from Google Drive, SharePoint, Confluence, Notion or email | No |
5Access, tenants and limits
| Capability | Answer | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Restricting a file to named people or groups | Partly | Enterprise only. Sending principals with a search works on every plan. Permissions |
| Separate tenants for your own customers | Yes | Sub-organizations, with usage per sub-organization. Plan quotas apply to the whole account. Managing sub-organizations from code |
| Published rate limits | Yes | Per key, by plan, with 429 and Retry-After. Practical notes |
| Regions | Partly | Mumbai at launch; others open on request. Regions |
| Published search and answer latency figures | No | |
| Single sign-on to the dashboard | No | |
| Audit of changes to keys and sub-organizations | Yes | There is no audit of every query. Managing sub-organizations from code |
| Security certifications | No | None is claimed. See Trust. |
| Private deployment in your own cloud | No | plycdn is a hosted service. |
6Building against it
| Capability | Answer | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| A complete HTTP API | Yes | API reference |
| A machine-readable API description | Yes | /docs/openapi.json |
| Server package for .NET | Yes | ASP.NET Core |
| Browser packages for Angular and React | Yes | Angular, React |
| Server packages for Node or Python | No | Call the HTTP API directly from any language. |
| Packages for Go or Java | No | |
| Retrievers for LangChain or LlamaIndex, or an MCP server | No | |
| Storage, video and live streaming in the same account | Yes | Storage, Video |
7Where to read more
Start here is the shortest road to a first search. Trust states where your data is processed, what is encrypted and what deleting removes.