> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://infino.ai/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Pharos

> Search nearly 100 million scholarly papers stored as plain Parquet on a bucket. Keyword, semantic, and hybrid retrieval, then analytics over the results in one SQL pass.

Pharos is a live demo of Infino serving the OpenAlex scholarly corpus
from 2018 to 2025, nearly 100 million works, as tables on a storage
bucket. The papers are plain Parquet with BM25 and vector indexes built
in. Search them three ways, then aggregate over the results in a single
SQL pass. There is no search cluster, no vector database, and no
warehouse behind it, just files in a bucket.

<Card title="Open Pharos" icon="arrow-up-right-from-square" href="https://pharos.infino.ai" horizontal>
  Runs in the browser, no login. Query nearly 100 million papers straight off object storage.
</Card>

## What to try

* Search a topic like *graph neural networks* and read the ranked
  papers. Keyword results come back in milliseconds.
* Switch the mode between keyword, semantic, and hybrid to see how the
  ranking shifts for the same query.
* Narrow the year range to watch results come back from a single yearly
  partition.
* Open the **insights** tab to aggregate over the matched papers in one
  SQL round trip: counts by year and country, average citations and
  field-weighted impact, open-access share.
* Open **under the hood** to see the schema, sample rows, and the
  Parquet layout Infino keeps on the bucket.

## How Infino powers it

| In the demo              | Infino feature                                                 |
| ------------------------ | -------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Keyword search           | BM25 full-text search                                          |
| Semantic search          | Vector search over paper embeddings                            |
| Hybrid search            | Fused keyword and vector ranking in one call                   |
| Compare the three modes  | The same query run keyword, semantic, and hybrid, side by side |
| Insights tab             | SQL over the same tables, aggregating the matched papers       |
| Under-the-hood inspector | The literal Parquet layout on object storage                   |

Every year of the corpus is one Infino table, stored as Parquet on the
bucket with its full-text and vector indexes alongside. A query reads
only the bytes it needs, so the corpus grows with the bucket instead of
a cluster.