# Retrieving responses from indexes in Amazon Kendra
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After you create an index, you can start searching your documents.

To search an Amazon Kendra index, you use either the [ Retrieve](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kendra/latest/APIReference/API_Retrieve.html) API operation or the [Query](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kendra/latest/APIReference/API_Query.html) API operation.

The Retrieve API operation is ideal for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) use cases. For a given query, it returns a ranked list of semantically relevant passages of up to 200 token words. You can send these to a large language model (LLM) to generate an answer using RAG. For more information, see [Searching an index](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kendra/latest/dg/searching.html).

The Query API operation is best for document search use cases. For a given query, it returns a list of ranked documents with 100 word excerpts that are relevant to the query. This is useful for traditional document search use cases where users are browsing through a list of ranked documents.

To see what features are supported by the Retrieve and Query API operations for each index type, see [Index types](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kendra/latest/dg/hiw-index-types.html).