Smart Search FAQs
Outline
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:

Smart Search Overview
