The Intradex is a massive encyclopedia of all information known by the Solarian empire.  Like many computer technologies it uses heuristic algorithms that bad queries can still produce the right information.  Written in a customizable fashion, it is tailored to the specific user.  Examples of this could be either eloquent and advanced in its terminology or loose with grammar and simpler words based on the settings.  It is primarily a information repository but also a very effective research and searching tool to find information.

Unlike modern search engines, the Intradex responds much more like how trying to elicit information from someone else actually works and makes a radical assumption the user knows what they are looking for.  It considers the entire sentence as a whole, and not parts.  Consider something like looking up an illness, often inundated with utterly useless and often unrelated information, even an un-customized Intradex will produce better results. A query like ‘low back pain from impact’ would only produce information to further be refined by the reader that would not include things like modern search engines do: emotional ‘impact’, societal impact of lower back pain, MRI impact on back pain.  It assumes if the reader wanted any of those others it would have included the words and is only looking about information regarding actual physical impacts that caused the pain.

One of the best features is a cataloging of the user’s past search and pages visited.  Therefore, there is never the issue of ‘what page was that?’, and typing a string of words like ‘dog, comment, running, mountains’ would find all visited pages that have this string, and would locate the specific comment where someone was talking about running in the mountains with their dog.

In short, it is much more user friendly and widespread.

The Intradex can be both customized to create the ‘search engine bubble’ effect common today, or ‘open/pure’ and results and not based on previous inquiries.

Trivia:  Intradex vol 4 (which is referenced many times in the VL Chronicles) is loosely implied to be at some point after the stories take place.