Web Search
Find real-time information from trusted internet sources.
Last updated: Nov 4, 2025
Overview
Web Search allows Harvey to reference real-time information from the internet — including current events, company websites, and newly published materials — to provide more accurate and up-to-date answers. This is especially useful when your work depends on recent legal developments, press releases, or regulatory updates that may not included in Harvey’s internal knowledge base.
For Admins: Enabling Web Search
Web Search is an opt-in feature.
- Workspace admins can reach out to their Harvey Success team to request access.
- Once enabled, all users in the workspace can access it.
You can also request to enable and customize a pop-up reminder for workspace users to avoid including sensitive information in Web Search queries.
For Users: How to Use Web Search
Follow these steps to run a Web Search query:
- Click Files and sources to select Web Search as a knowledge source, or Harvey may recommend it underneath the prompt window.
- Input your query and click Ask Harvey.
- Harvey reformulates your text into a secure search query and sends it to You.com. Then You.com returns relevant results, which Harvey uses to produce a response, often including citations or summaries from the retrieved web pages.
How Data is Handled
At a high-level, when you submit a Web Search query:
- Harvey reformulates it into a query optimized for retrieval.
- This query (never your full documents or text) are securely transmitted to You.com.
- All data is encrypted, processed temporarily, and deleted immediately after results are returned.
We partner with You.com for their strict contractual and technical safeguards:
- No data storage, training, or human review: You.com does not store, train on, or allow human access to Harvey user data.
- Temporary processing only: Queries are processed briefly and deleted immediately after results are returned.
- Secure environment: All processing occurs within You.com’s secure AWS infrastructure.
- U.S.-based data handling: Data is processed exclusively within the United States regardless of your instance’s regional hosting set up.
- End-to-end encryption (TLS 1.2+ in transit, AES-256+ at rest)
Even if sensitive data is accidentally included, You.com’s zero-retention policy ensures it is never stored or accessible.
For additional details, read our Service Terms.