Lens & Web Search
Lens is Varen's grounded research mode: answers built from your own documents, with numbered citations you can inspect. This guide covers what Lens is, how citations work, when the live web is consulted, and how to get the best results.
What Lens is
A conversation workspace answers from general knowledge, shaped by your profile and whatever context accumulates as you chat. A Lens workspace is different: it answers from your corpus — the documents you have uploaded — rather than from the model's general knowledge. Upload the contracts, the reports, the policy documents, the correspondence; then ask questions against them. The corpus is the authority.
Lens is for investigation rather than chat: checking what a lease actually says, comparing figures across statements, finding every mention of a clause, tracing how a position changed across versions of a document. Questions are answered with deeper retrieval over your documents, and every substantive claim is tied back to the passage it came from.
When the corpus doesn't know
Grounding has a necessary consequence: if your documents don't cover a question, Lens says so. Rather than silently falling back to general knowledge or the web and presenting a plausible-sounding answer as if it came from your corpus, Lens tells you the material isn't there. That refusal is a feature — it is what makes the citations meaningful. When a Lens answer makes a claim, the claim is in your documents; when Lens can't answer, you know the gap is in your corpus, not in the system's willingness to guess.
Citations
Lens answers carry numbered citations, collected in a sources list on each turn. What a citation opens depends on its type:
- Corpus citations open the source document in a viewer with the cited lines highlighted, so you can read the exact passage in context and judge whether the answer represented it fairly.
- Web citations open the source page in a new browser tab.
Citations are evidence of what was retrieved for that answer — they let you verify the working. They are not a guarantee that a source is current, authoritative, or applicable to your circumstances; that judgement stays with you, and the citations exist precisely so you can exercise it.
Web search
Alongside your corpus, Varen can consult the live web. Each turn is assessed, and a search runs when the question calls for it — current rules, recent events, prices, or material outside your documents. Results appear in a collapsible Web results panel in the conversation. You can open a result in a new tab, or use Add to Assets to fetch the page into the workspace, where it becomes part of your local corpus and can be cited in future answers.
Web search runs through a gateway hosted with the control plane, and it is tuned for the kinds of questions Varen's advisers handle. Searches can be scoped to curated, authoritative domains — official government, legal, and regulatory sources are preferred for Australian questions — and news sources are included where currency matters. Whether the web is consulted at all depends on the service configuration; it is not a per-workspace switch.
Getting the best from Lens
- Build the corpus first. Upload the relevant documents before asking detailed questions. Lens is only as strong as what it can cite. See Files & Resources for supported types.
- Ask corpus questions. "What does the lease say about the break clause?" plays to Lens's strengths; "what is a break clause?" is a general-knowledge question better asked in a conversation workspace.
- Use the citations. Open them. If an answer misreads a passage, the citation view shows you immediately, and you can restate the question with the passage in view.
- Add good web sources to Assets. When a web result is worth keeping — an official guidance page, a current rate table — fetch it into the workspace so later turns cite it as corpus rather than re-finding it on the web.