Define What Counts as a Duplicate Before Adding Embedding Search to Your Image Pipeline
My dedup check flagged two prints with identical composition but different colors as one image. Here is how I split duplicate detection into three layers, measured where perceptual hashing ends, and decided what embedding search is actually for.
When Your Knowledge Base Shifts Mid-Run: Pinning File Search to an Execution Epoch for Consistent Agent Grounding
When a File Search store is updated while a Managed Agent is running, a single execution can mix old and new grounding. Borrowing MVCC ideas, pinning an execution epoch keeps one agent run's evidence consistent. Here is the design and implementation.
One File Search Store for Many Apps: Splitting Retrieval With customMetadata and Chunk Config
Put several apps' FAQs in a single Gemini File Search store and metadataFilter can silently return empty grounding, or answers get split across chunk boundaries. Here is the customMetadata design, the AIP-160 filter-syntax trap, and measured chunkingConfig tuning.
Deleting the Source Isn't Enough — A Ledger Design for Propagating Deletes Through Gemini-Derived Data
When a user deletes their data, the embeddings, caches, and File Search documents you generated from it live on. A provenance ledger written at generation time, per-sink propagation workers, and a verification sweep make deletion actually reach your derived data.
Don't Ingest Gemini Deep Research Reports Blindly — A Citation-Verification Acceptance Gate for MCP-Grounded Research
Now that Deep Research connects to MCP servers and File Search, you can ground research on your own data. This builds an acceptance gate that verifies, before any automated ingest, whether each citation resolves to a trusted source — with an allowlist, a grounding-coverage ratio, and categorized reject reasons, all in working code.
Put Help Docs and Screenshots in One File Search Store and Return Answers That Cite the Image Too
Your text help docs and your screenshots live in separate stores, so a single question can never return both the steps and the matching screen. With gemini-embedding-2 going multimodal in File Search, here is how I merged them and returned the cited screenshot alongside the answer.
Letting File Search's Multimodal Mode Find Wallpapers I Couldn't: A Field Report
I tested whether File Search's new multimodal retrieval (gemini-embedding-2) could replace category tags for finding one wallpaper among thousands. A 300-image trial, the walls I hit, and where semantic search actually fits — with working code.