What it learns
Relic watches which item you pick and quietly moves that sort of item up next time. Nothing about the item changes. It only changes where it sits in a list of results that already match what you typed.
Three things nudge an item up:
- How often you use it. An address you paste every week beats one you pasted once in March.
- Which words you used. If you search ein and always pick the same line, that line comes first the next time you search ein.
- Which app you were in. Summon Relic from your terminal and the things you usually paste into a terminal come up first.
The effect is deliberately small. It settles a close call between two results that both match. It never lifts something over a clearly better match, and it never puts an item in a list it does not belong in.
This works alongside the ordinary ranking on the search page and the meaning pass on Search by meaning. It also fades: an item you stop reaching for drifts back down over a few weeks.
It stays on the device
What Relic learns is kept on the machine that learned it. It is not part of your vault, so it never goes to the server and never reaches your other devices. Your laptop and your desktop each build their own sense of what you reach for.
Turning it off or clearing it
Both rows are in Settings›Search and AI.
Turning Personalized ranking off stops every one of these signals at once, and results go back to plain matching. Clear learned ranking throws away what has been learned so far and starts again from nothing. Use it if you inherited a machine, or if a stale favourite keeps coming first.
Clearing does not touch your items, your tags or your Vault. The full pane is on Settings: Search and AI.
On your phone
The phone has its own switch in the settings sheet, under Search, and its own separate memory.
Turning it off on your phone leaves your computer alone, and the other way round. See Settings on your phone.