`> I develop a privacy-first RAG chatbot for WordPress. This combines two writeups from pagecoder.ai - on search and on chunking - and continues my earlier post on what AI chat plugins leak per question.
Last cycle I added two things to my WordPress RAG plugin that people kept asking for: visitor-facing search, and indexing big PDFs. Each one came down to a retrieval decision worth writing down.
1. Search: retrieve, but don't generate
My chatbot answers in two stages - retrieve the most relevant content, then hand it to a model that writes a reply. Search is just the first stage, stopped before the second.
When you type into the search box, I run the same retrieval the chatbot uses and then stop. No model is asked to compose an answer. You get the raw matches back: ranked results with your terms highlighted.
