Ingested but Never Cited: Pruning a File Search Store with Citation Logs and a Quarantine Window
Most documents in a File Search store are never cited, quietly draining both cost and retrieval quality. Learn to log grounding metadata, surface never-cited documents from real usage data, and prune them safely with a quarantine window — with working code.
Mixing Text and Images in One File Search Skewed My Results Toward Images — Rebalancing by Modality After Retrieval
When you put text and images in a single File Search store with gemini-embedding-2, results can quietly skew toward one modality. Here is how to measure that skew and even it out after retrieval, using per-modality normalization and quota-based merging — with working code.
Citing the exact page and figure in File Search answers with visual-citation metadata
File Search grounding metadata now carries media_id and page_numbers, so you can trace each sentence of an answer back to a specific page and figure. Here's how I built a sentence-level, verifiable citation layer over a mix of PDFs and images.
Your File Search Store Goes Stale in Production — Catalog Sync and Drift Detection That Actually Hold
Load a catalog into File Search once and forget it, and within weeks it starts confidently pointing users at assets you already pulled. Here is the sync pipeline I run: hash-based incremental import, a blue/green rebuild that swallows deletions, and a nightly drift audit.