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 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). The text you type is then searched in the following fields of the content available in the platform:

• Title
• Description
• Short description (available for some training materials)
• Course additional fields (only text additional fields)
• Course ID (only for courses)
• Tags for informal content uploaded via Discover, Coach & Share, as well as tags for formal content. Tags include both tags you have manually selected and - in case of content in the following languages: English, Italian, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese - tags that have been suggested by Docebo's artificial intelligence tagging algorithm, if the auto tagging feature is enabled.
• Skills associated with formal or informal content, including both skills manually selected by users and skills that have been suggested by Docebo's artificial intelligence skill assignment algorithm, if the auto skill assignment feature is enabled.
• Words that may be included within an informal or formal content (for example, text in a document-type content or what may be said by a narrator in a video or audio – works with English as well as non-English content that Docebo can transform from speech to text)

How are search results sorted?

The global search uses a full-text search and prioritizes results based on the Elasticsearch engine. Search results are sorted according to the priority of the searchable fields provided by Docebo to the Elasticsearch engine 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 Elasticsearch base algorithm:

As an example, if the term you are searching is included in the tags of an asset and in the title of a course, the asset will be displayed before the course in the search results list. 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. If you wish to learn more on Elasticsearch, here follow some interesting links:

• Elasticsearch term relevance (opens in a new tab)
• Elasticsearch scoring theory (opens in a new tab)
• Elasticsearch query time boost (opens in a new tab)

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.