Prepare data for ingesting

How you prepare data depends on the kind of data you're importing and the way you choose to import it. Start with what kind of data you plan to import:

For information about blended search, where multiple data stores can be connected to a single generic search app, see About connecting multiple data stores.

Website data

When you create a data store for website data, you provide the URLs of web pages that Google should crawl and index for searching or recommending.

Before indexing your website data:

  • Decide which URL patterns to include in your indexing and which to exclude.

    • Exclude the patterns for dynamic URLs. Dynamic URLs are URLs that change at the time of serving depending on the request.

      For example, the URL patterns for the web pages that serve the search results, such as www.example.com/search/*. Suppose, a user searches for the phrase Nobel prize, the dynamic search URL might be a unique URL: www.example.com/search?q=nobel%20prize/UNIQUE_STRING. If the URL pattern www.example.com/search/* is not excluded, then all such unique, dynamic search URLs that follow this pattern are indexed. This results in a bloated index and a diluted search quality.

    • Eliminate duplicate URLs using canonical URL patterns. This provides a single canonical URL for Google Search when crawling the website and removes ambiguity. For examples of canonicalization and more information, see What is URL canonicalization and How to specify a canonical URL with rel="canonical" and other methods.

  • You can include URL patterns either from the same or different domains that need to be indexed and exclude patterns that must not be indexed. The number of URL patterns that you can include and exclude differs in the following way:

    Indexing type Included sites Excluded sites
    Basic website search Maximum of 50 URL patterns Maximum of 50 URL patterns
    Advanced website indexing Maximum of 500 URL patterns Maximum of 500 URL patterns

  • Check that the web pages you plan to provide are not using robots.txt to block indexing. For more information, see Introduction to robot.txt.

  • If you plan to use Advanced website indexing, you must be able to verify the domains for the URL patterns in your data store.

  • Add structured data in the form of meta tags and PageMaps to your data store schema to enrich your indexing as explained in Use structured data for advanced website indexing.

Unstructured data

Vertex AI Search supports search over documents that are in HTML, PDF with embedded text, and TXT format. PPTX and DOCX formats are available in Preview.

You import your documents from a Cloud Storage bucket. You can import using Google Cloud console, by the ImportDocuments method, or by streaming ingestion through CRUD methods. For API reference information, see DocumentService and documents.

The following table lists the file size limits of each file type with different configurations (for more information, see Parse and chunk documents). You can import up to 100,000 files at a time.

File type Default import Import with layout-aware document chunking Import with layout parser
Text-based files such as HTML, TXT, JSON, XHTML, and XML < 2.5 MB < 10 MB < 10 MB
PPTX, DOCX, and XLSX < 200 MB < 200 MB < 200 MB
PDF < 200 MB < 200 MB < 40 MB

If you plan to include embeddings in your unstructured data, see Use custom embeddings.

If you have non-searchable PDFs (scanned PDFs or PDFs with text inside images, such as infographics) we recommend turning on optical character recognition (OCR) processing during data store creation. This allows Vertex AI Search to extract elements such as text blocks and tables. If you have searchable PDFs that are mostly composed of machine-readable text and contain many tables, you can consider turning on OCR processing with the option for machine-readable text enabled in order to improve detection and parsing. For more information, see Parse and chunk documents.

If you want to use Vertex AI Search for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), turn on document chunking when you create your data store. For more information, see Parse and chunk documents.

You can import unstructured data from the following sources:

Cloud Storage

You can import data from Cloud Storage with or without metadata.

Data import is not recursive. That is, if there are folders within the bucket or folder that you specify, files within those folders are not imported.

If you plan to import documents from Cloud Storage without metadata, put your documents directly into a Cloud Storage bucket. The document ID is an example of metadata.

For testing, you can use the following publicly available Cloud Storage folders, which contain PDFs:

  • gs://cloud-samples-data/gen-app-builder/search/alphabet-investor-pdfs
  • gs://cloud-samples-data/gen-app-builder/search/CUAD_v1
  • gs://cloud-samples-data/gen-app-builder/search/kaiser-health-surveys
  • gs://cloud-samples-data/gen-app-builder/search/stanford-cs-224

If you plan to import data from Cloud Storage with metadata, put a JSON file that contains the metadata into a Cloud Storage bucket whose location you provide during import.

Your unstructured documents can be in the same Cloud Storage bucket as your metadata or a different one.

The metadata file must be a JSON Lines or an NDJSON file. The document ID is an example of metadata. Each row of the metadata file must follow one of the following JSON formats:

  • Using jsonData:
    • { "id": "<your-id>", "jsonData": "<JSON string>", "content": { "mimeType": "<application/pdf or text/html>", "uri": "gs://<your-gcs-bucket>/directory/filename.pdf" } }
  • Using structData:
    • { "id": "<your-id>", "structData": { <JSON object> }, "content": { "mimeType": "<application/pdf or text/html>", "uri": "gs://<your-gcs-bucket>/directory/filename.pdf" } }

Use the uri field in each row to point to the Cloud Storage location of the document.

Here is an example of an NDJSON metadata file for an unstructured document. In this example, each line of the metadata file points to a PDF document and contains the metadata for that document. The first two lines use jsonData and the second two lines use structData. With structData you don't need to escape quotation marks that appear within quotation marks.

{"id":"doc-0","jsonData":"{\"title\":\"test_doc_0\",\"description\":\"This document uses a blue color theme\",\"color_theme\":\"blue\"}","content":{"mimeType":"application/pdf","uri":"gs://test-bucket-12345678/test_doc_0.pdf"}}
{"id":"doc-1","jsonData":"{\"title\":\"test_doc_1\",\"description\":\"This document uses a green color theme\",\"color_theme\":\"green\"}","content":{"mimeType":"application/pdf","uri":"gs://test-bucket-12345678/test_doc_1.pdf"}}
{"id":"doc-2","structData":{"title":"test_doc_2","description":"This document uses a red color theme","color_theme":"red"},"content":{"mimeType":"application/pdf","uri":"gs://test-bucket-12345678/test_doc_3.pdf"}}
{"id":"doc-3","structData":{"title":"test_doc_3","description":"This is document uses a yellow color theme","color_theme":"yellow"},"content":{"mimeType":"application/pdf","uri":"gs://test-bucket-12345678/test_doc_4.pdf"}}

To create your data store, see Create a search data store or Create a recommendations data store.

BigQuery

If you plan to import metadata from BigQuery, create a BigQuery table that contains metadata. The document ID is an example of metadata.

Put your unstructured documents into a Cloud Storage bucket.

Use the following BigQuery schema. Use the uri field in each record to point to the Cloud Storage location of the document.

[
  {
    "name": "id",
    "mode": "REQUIRED",
    "type": "STRING",
    "fields": []
  },
  {
    "name": "jsonData",
    "type": "STRING",
    "fields": []
  },
  {
    "name": "content",
    "type": "RECORD",
    "mode": "NULLABLE",
    "fields": [
      {
        "name": "mimeType",
        "type": "STRING",
        "mode": "NULLABLE"
      },
      {
        "name": "uri",
        "type": "STRING",
        "mode": "NULLABLE"
      }
    ]
  }
]

For more information, see Create and use tables in the BigQuery documentation.

To create your data store, see Create a search data store or Create a recommendations data store.

Google Drive

Syncing data from Google Drive is supported for generic search.

If you plan to import data from Google Drive, you must set up Google Identity as your identity provider in Vertex AI Agent Builder. For information about setting up access control, see Use data source access control.

To create your data store, see Create a search data store.

Structured data

Prepare your data according to the import method that you plan to use. If you plan to ingest media data, also see Structured media data.

You can import structured data from the following sources:

When you import structured data from BigQuery or from Cloud Storage, you are given the option to import the data with metadata. (Structured with metadata is also referred to as enhanced structured data.)

BigQuery

You can import structured data from BigQuery datasets.

Your schema is auto-detected. After importing, Google recommends that you edit the auto-detected schema to map key properties, such as titles. If you import using the API instead of the Google Cloud console, you have the option to provide your own schema as a JSON object. For more information, see Provide or auto-detect a schema.

For examples of publicly available structured data, see the BigQuery public datasets.

If you plan to include embeddings in your structured data, see Use custom embeddings.

If you select to import structured data with metadata, you include two fields in your BigQuery tables:

  • An id field to identify the document. If you import structured data without metadata, then the id is generated for you. Including metadata lets you specify the value of id.

  • A jsonData field that contains the data. For examples of jsonData strings, see the preceding section Cloud Storage.

Use the following BigQuery schema for structured data with metadata imports:

[
  {
    "name": "id",
    "mode": "REQUIRED",
    "type": "STRING",
    "fields": []
  },
  {
    "name": "jsonData",
    "mode": "NULLABLE",
    "type": "STRING",
    "fields": []
  }
]

For instructions on creating your data store, see Create a search data store or Create a recommendations data store.

Cloud Storage

Structured data in Cloud Storage must be in either JSON Lines or NDJSON format. Each file must be 2 GB or smaller. You can import up to 100 files at a time.

For examples of publicly available structured data, refer to the following folders in Cloud Storage, which contain NDJSON files:

  • gs://cloud-samples-data/gen-app-builder/search/kaggle_movies
  • gs://cloud-samples-data/gen-app-builder/search/austin_311

If you plan to include embeddings in your structured data, see Use custom embeddings.

Here is an example of an NDJSON metadata file of structured data. Each line of the file represents a document and is made up of a set of fields.

{"hotel_id": 10001, "title": "Hotel 1", "location": {"address": "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043"}, "available_date": "2024-02-10", "non_smoking": true, "rating": 3.7, "room_types": ["Deluxe", "Single", "Suite"]}
{"hotel_id": 10002, "title": "Hotel 2", "location": {"address": "Manhattan, New York, NY 10001"}, "available_date": "2023-07-10", "non_smoking": false, "rating": 5.0, "room_types": ["Deluxe", "Double", "Suite"]}
{"hotel_id": 10003, "title": "Hotel 3", "location": {"address": "Moffett Park, Sunnyvale, CA 94089"}, "available_date": "2023-06-24", "non_smoking": true, "rating": 2.5, "room_types": ["Double", "Penthouse", "Suite"]}

To create your data store, see Create a search data store or Create a recommendations data store.

For information about formatting FAQ data in CSV files for chat apps, see Structured data store in the Dialogflow CX documentation.

Local JSON data

You can directly upload a JSON document or object using the API.

Google recommends providing your own schema as a JSON object for better results. If you don't provide your own schema, the schema is auto-detected. After importing, we recommend that you edit the auto-detected schema to map key properties, such as titles. For more information, see Provide or auto-detect a schema.

If you plan to include embeddings in your structured data, see Use custom embeddings.

To create your data store, see Create a search data store or Create a recommendations data store.

Structured media data

If you plan to ingest structured media data, such as videos, news, or music, review the following:

Third-party data sources

Ingesting from third-party data sources is a preview with allowlist feature.

Third-party data source connections are supported for generic search.

When you connect a third-party data source, the data is initially ingested and then is synced to Vertex AI Search at a frequency that you specify.

Before setting up your data source connection, you must set up access control for your data source. For information about setting up access control, see Use data source access control.

For required credentials to connect a data source, go to the documentation for connecting the third-party data source that you plan to ingest from:

Healthcare FHIR data

If you plan to ingest FHIR data from Cloud Healthcare API, ensure the following:

  • Location: The source FHIR store must be in a Cloud Healthcare API dataset that's in the us-central1, us, or eu location. For more information, see Create and manage datasets in Cloud Healthcare API.
  • FHIR store type: The source FHIR store must be an R4 data store. You can check the versions of your FHIR stores by listing the FHIR stores in your dataset. To create a FHIR R4 store, see Create FHIR stores.
  • Import quota: The source FHIR store must have fewer than 1 million FHIR resources. If there are more than 1 million FHIR resources, the import process stops after this limit is reached. For more information, see Quotas and limits.
  • The files referenced in a DocumentReference resource must be PDF, RTF, or image files that are stored in Cloud Storage. The link to the referenced files must be in the content[].attachment.url field of the resource in the standard Cloud Storage path format: gs://BUCKET_NAME/PATH_TO_REFERENCED_FILE.
  • Review the list of FHIR R4 resources that Vertex AI Search supports. For more information, see Healthcare FHIR R4 data schema reference.