Sandbox release disclaimer: Some content in this article outlines how to use functionalities that will be publicly released to all clients at the end of July 2026. If you see differences between this article and your platform, check back at that time. Learn more about the release cycle.
Disclaimer: Some content in this article outlines how to use functionalities that may not be available on all plans. Get in touch with your account manager (if your plan includes this option) or reach out to Docebo using your platform's Help center if you wish to upgrade your plan.
Introduction
In your platform, you can perform a global search for courses, learning plans, training material, informal learning assets, or questions & answers. Using the search bar at the top of your platform, simply type in the information for which you’re searching, then press the magnifying glass icon next to the bar.
Please note: This article describes the legacy global search interface. If Harmony search is enabled on your platform, refer instead to the article Harmony search > Search results page.
Please note that search results depend on visibility, meaning that you will only see content that you’ve been assigned to see.
For example, courses or learning plans (and any related assets within them) in which you are not enrolled will not appear, unless they are published in a catalog which you are entitled to see (because the Superadmin has set the "Pending Admin Approval" or "Free" options in its enrollment policy), or appear with a padlock if the enrollment policy is set by the Superadmin to "Only Admins can enroll learners".
Which search criteria should I use?
When searching for content in your platform, you need at least 3 characters or words to trigger a search (blank spaces and dash characters “-” will be excluded from the character count). Global search returns results from both formal and informal content available in the platform, including courses, learning plans, training materials, assets, and questions and answers, as long as you have visibility on them.
The text you type is then searched in the following fields of the content available in the platform:
- Title
- Description
- Menu items (for further information, see Accessing the menu using the global or Harmony search)
- Short description (available for some training materials)
- Course additional fields (only text field and free text field)
- Learning plan additional fields (only text field and free text field)
- Course ID (only for courses if Harmony search is enabled)
- Tags associated with content, including manually selected tags and tags automatically suggested by Docebo’s artificial intelligence tagging algorithm, when auto tagging is enabled.
- Skills associated with content, including manually selected skills and skills suggested by Docebo's artificial intelligence skill assignment algorithm, when the auto skill assignment is enabled.
- Words contained in the content itself, such as text in a document or speech extracted from audio or video files. See the complete list of supported content types for text extraction and transcript generation.
How are search results sorted?
The global search uses a full-text search and prioritizes results based on the AWS OpenSearch engine. Search results are sorted according to the priority of the searchable fields provided by Docebo to the AWS OpenSearch algorithm.
The following table lists the items and their relative boost number used by Docebo to add more relevance to the relative searchable field in the AWS OpenSearch base algorithm:
| Field |
Boost (if the query is not quoted, e.g. my query) |
Boost (if the query is quoted, e.g. "my query") |
| Title |
10.5, if at least one word in the search query matches completely one word in the field 1.5, if all matches are only on partial words |
3, if the exact sequence of words is found in the field 0 (no match), if the exact sequence of words is not found in the field |
|
Course UUID Short description Description Additional fields Transcript |
3.5, if at least one word in the search query matches completely one word in the field 0.5, if all matches are only on partial words |
1, if the exact sequence of words is found in the field 0 (no match), if the exact sequence of words is not found in the field |
|
Tags Skills |
9, if the whole search query matches exactly the whole tag/skill 3, if at least one word in the search query matches completely one word in the tag/skill 0 (no match), if all matches are only on partial words |
3, if the whole search query matches exactly the whole tag/skill 1, if at least one word in the search query matches completely one word in the tag/skill 0 (no match), if all matches are only on partial words |
However, boosts are not the sole determinants of ranking. The final relevance score also depends on other factors including:
- The quality of the content's match with the query (e.g., full vs. partial matches, word order).
- The frequency and prominence of the match within the field.
- The overall length of the field's content.
In essence, a field with a higher boost does not guarantee that its content will always rank higher in search results
Please note that, for security reasons, the platform artificial intelligence does not access private content (that is, content requiring authentication to be accessed) and can thus automatically generate tags and skills only for public content. When uploading private content, we suggest you add tags and skills manually.
Remember that only Superadmins and experts can add tags manually when uploading an informal asset, while users can add or edit manual tags only once their asset has been published.
Managing search results
Once you’ve typed your search criteria into the search bar, the search results matching the searched terms the most are listed right under the search bar. Click on the title of the content in the list to access it directly. Below each title is a description of the content, including the type of content (course, learning plan, training material, course belonging to a catalog, asset, or question & answer). If the search term appears in the asset’s content or tags, you will see an indication of this in the search result.
Click All results underneath the list to access the page listing all of the returned results, where search results are divided into six tabs: All Results, My Courses and Learning Plans, Training Material, Course Catalogs, Knowledge Assets, and Questions & Answers. All of these tabs are compliant with the platform accessibility standard.
- All results. This tab shows all content that appears in your search, regardless of the content category. It is a summary page of all returned results.
- My courses and learning plans. This tab shows any results that are courses or learning plans in which you are enrolled. The search is carried out only on the Published courses and does not take into account courses Under Maintenance.
- Training material. This tab shows any results that are training material found belonging to the courses you can see (e.g. because they are part of a catalog), regardless of you being enrolled or not in those courses. For training materials, the search is carried out also on the training material tags and on its transcript.
- Course catalogs. This tab shows any results that are courses or learning plans within the catalog for which you have visibility. Using the Filters item in this tab, you can filter the search results by type, language, price, and other filters. The language filter does not apply to learning plans, as they may be composed of courses having different languages. When filtering the search results of this tab by language, learning plans are always displayed.
- Assets. This tab shows any results that are informal learning assets for which you have visibility, meaning that you published the asset yourself, or another learner published the asset in a channel that you can view.
- Questions & answers. This tab shows any results that are questions & answers for which you have visibility, meaning the question was asked in a channel that you can view or a course in which you’re enrolled. The tabs can be sorted by best match (default sorting), newest to oldest, oldest to newest, A-Z, Z-A, and lowest price to highest price (and vice versa) for catalogs.
Notes on visibility
-
The search results visibility depends on the
user role and level:
- Superadmins can view all content in all tabs.
- Power Users can view any content assigned to them as a resource and manage it as a Superadmin. For instance, if a learning plan completion flow includes prerequisites, the Power User will bypass them and access any course from the global search.
- Instructors can view all content in the courses that they are assigned as instructors.
- Depending on the settings of the Global search tab of the platform Advanced settings, the search results page might not display all of the tabs listed in this article, and they might be sorted differently.
- After enrolling in a course or learning plan by clicking on its entry in the Course catalogs tab, it may take a few minutes for the content to appear on the My courses and learning plans page due to platform caching.
- When filtering search results for skills, users will only see the skills they have visibility on.
Search restrictions
The following strings return no results. To search for them, try using only part of the string.
- localhost
- 127.0.0.1