Smart Search FAQs

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.

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