Need a TL;DR on Intellum's Smart Search? Wondering about the kinds of results your learners are - or could be - getting? Well, you've found the right article!

This article breaks down the basic mechanics of Intellum's Smart Search and the logic that impacts a user's search results.

Search Mechanics:

When users search a word or phrase, Intellum...

Identifies the search terms
Strips Stop Words like “and”, “the”, “if”, etc.
Stems & Lemmatizes the query (for inflection, plurals and verb tenses)
Judges Topic Proximity (if query is part of existing Topic)
Identifies synonyms
Compensates for potential misspellings
Searches content table for matches
Ranks results based on criteria listed above

Search Results & Ranking:

How do Smart Search actions affect a user’s results?

Expands query to other relevant results, surfacing meaningful content.
Personalizes results list to each user based on their Topic follows
Boosts results that match a user’s assigned locale (if other than English)

Do Topics affect search results?

Yes - If a user follows a Topic, search results in that Topic will be ranked higher in the results list, providing a personalized search experience for that user and her interests

What affects ranking more - Followed Topics, Keywords, or an Activity’s Name?

An activity’s name, especially if it’s an exact match for the query, outranks all other criteria; so an exact match will always appear atop the results list
A followed Topic will rank higher than a Keyword match

Do admin see different results than learners?

User type has no impact on search

Does Discover Tab content behave differently?

Nope

Smart Search & Your Content:

What kinds of content are indexed and searched?

Activities authored in EVOLVE
Documents (if searchable)
Posts
URLs and Links, via a custom API to get the text out of pdf, doc, xdoc and other documents
Images, via Google Cloud Vision API to get labels, text, and description
Videos, via Google Intelligence Video API to get labels, text, categories, and description

Does it search inside SCORM and AICC content?

You know it.

Search Results Visibility:

AKA...Can a User See My Activity?

Does that mean path settings overpower activity settings?

They can; if a path can show up in search, all the activities in it can too

Why is that?

If an activity is in a path - and a user can access the path - then the user can access the individual activities within that path

What if the order of the path is locked?

All activities in a path can appear in the results list. However, if the user clicks and opens a locked activity they’ll see a message telling them the activity is locked

Can I prevent the activities within a path from appearing in search results?

Yes, use the Deep Search setting in the path’s properties to keep individual activities from appearing in search results, within the context of the path.

Learn More:

Intellum

Smart Search FAQs

Outline