Thoughts so far?

leward
Community Contributor

Hello fellow smart search testers. What are your thoughts so far?  At this point I am not finding the smart search feature to be particularly useful and I probably won't continue until someone from Instructure announces a major improvement.  In my experience, far to many irrelevant items are returned for every search expression, and often the item I'd expect to see at the top is several documents down.  Maybe I am too old fashioned, but I would like to be able to do things like:

  • search for an exact match to a quoted phrase
  • search item titles only
  • filter by date, content type, name of creator, contributor, etc
  • sort results by date

Also, in order to be useful to instructors, smart search needs to include course files.  

I know this is just the first iteration and I am hopeful that the tool will improve dramatically before it is released to the masses.  In a courses with large numbers of canvas content and file items, it’s critical that users of the tool have enough control to find what they are looking for.  I suppose this could be done be creating a long and detailed prompt, but built-in controls for refining results are much more efficient and will yield much more predictable results.

I would be interested in hearing the experiences of other testers.

Lynn