Filtering with Search

Atomic Search has provided filters to further narrow the results.

There are three filters within Search:

All Types
Relevance
Current Course

All Types

The first filter is 'All Types', which returns results from any source containing the search criteria within the course. All Types is the default setting for this filter.

When the menu is expanded, it allows you to further narrow the type of content you are seeking:

Assignments
Discussions
Files
Pages
Quizzes

If you know you're looking for an assignment, select 'Assignments' from the drop-down menu and only assignments will be shown in the list of results.

Note: You may not see results from all the categories listed above. The filter is based on your search results and will only show those items that relate to the results, as shown in the screenshot below.

Relevance

The next filter is 'Relevance', which sorts the results as to how close they are to the search criteria. When the menu is expanded, it provides you with the option to sort by 'Recency', or when (how recently) the content was added. Relevance is the default setting.

Current Course

The final filter is 'Current Course' which only returns results from the course in which you performed your search. When expanded, this menu also gives you the option to sort via 'My Courses', which includes ALL of your courses in the search, giving you a much broader field of results.

If you access Search from within a course, 'Current Course' is the default setting for this filter.

Note: If you access Search from the blue Global Navigation bar, the default setting is 'This Account', which is the same as 'My courses'.

Search Features

Along with the filters, Search has a few features that are worth noting. These features can be accessed via the 'More' menu:

Features:

Course settings -
- allows students to search the course (do not turn this feature off)
View analytics
- displays the top 10 searches over a specified amount of time (Yesterday, Last Week, Last Month, Last Year, or All Time)
- displays the number of searches
- option to download a .csv file of the search analytics for the course
Reindex Course
- Search updates the index for active* courses every 10 hours. If you make changes and would like to have those changes available for searching immediately, you can do so by reindexing the course.
- Reindex option also displays the last time the course was last scanned.
Save search results
- Download the search results for your course
Documentation
- Link to Search Guides

*It's worth noting again that only active courses are scanned and indexed every 10 hours. Search defines an active course as:

The course is published.
If the course level start date is before today and its end date is after today and its start date is less than one year before today
If there aren't course-level dates set, we fall back to the term start and end dates
If there is a start date but no end date, and the start date is less than 1 year ago

Additional Resources:

Filtering and sorting Atomic Search results
Course search analytics
Manually request to update the index for a course immediately