Get the document, not ten search results

Search gives you a results page. That is a reasonable thing to want when you are browsing and a poor thing to receive when you have a question, because you still have to open four documents to find out which one answers it.

The difference between Search and Ask in Documents is exactly that, and it is worth knowing which you want.

Use Search when you know it exists

Search finds documents by meaning rather than by filename, which is genuinely useful when you half-remember something: the contract with the odd notice clause, the brief that mentioned the Q3 launch.

You get ranked documents. You open one.

Use Ask when you have a question

Ask reads across the documents and answers, citing what it used.

How much notice do we have to give Northwind to stop the contract, and does
that change if we are inside the first year?

That is not a search. There is no document called "notice periods", and the answer may need two documents read together. You want the sentence, and the source so you can check it.

Always look at the citation, every time, for the first fortnight. An answer with a source is checkable in ten seconds; an answer without one has to be trusted, and you have not yet earned the right to trust it. The habit of glancing at the source is what tells you early whether the index covers what you think it covers.

Ask the question you would ask a colleague

The most common mistake is typing keywords, out of habit. "notice period northwind" gets you a search. "How much notice do we have to give Northwind" gets you an answer.

Phrasing it as a question is not politeness; it is what tells the system you want a synthesis rather than a ranking.

When it says it does not know, believe it

An honest "our documents do not cover this" is the most valuable response Ask gives you, because it is a gap in your knowledge base found by someone who needed it.

Write the missing document. That is how the library gets better — driven by real questions rather than by an afternoon spent guessing what to document.

Point people at Ask, not at the folder

The usual failure with a knowledge base is that it exists and nobody uses it, because using it means browsing. If a new starter's first instruction is "ask it", they will; if it is "have a look in Documents", they will ask a person instead.

What good looks like

Somebody with a question gets a sentence and a source in ten seconds, rather than a folder and a free afternoon.

The measure is how often people ask each other things that are written down. If that has not fallen, they do not know Ask exists.