Smart Search • Change Log
2024-06-05 |
Updated Features
Added How It Works Button
A “How It Works” button to better explain the current scope of Smart Search beta to users in the context of the application.
Fixed Course Breadcrumbs
Course breadcrumbs omitted the course name leading to some confusion about scope of search. Search is now correctly nested in Breadcrumbs.
Keyword highlighting
Initial Keyword highlighting has been implemented in the preview of search results. This will be improved, but we wanted to deliver a simple version of this in the current release.
Open Search Item in New tab
Search results will open in a new tab, allowing you to maintain your current search results page
Browser "Back" support
Parameters are added to the URL for search that will allow you to share the link to your search query results
Persistent UI Feedback
When selected, the thumbs up/thumbs down feedback should persist next to your result.
Removed Relevancy Scores
Relevancy scores have been removed from the UI. We’re still planning on tracking it on the back end, but it seemed like it was more confusing than helpful to display in the UI.
2024-05-22 |
Updated Features
AI Model Change
We have shifted from using an OpenAI model to using the Cohere Embed Multilingual model hosted on AWS Bedrock which will offer more flexibility to expand to customers across more regions. You may notice a significant change in the Relevancy scores as a result of this update. Details about our latest AI model are provided inSmart Search • FAQ (see the nutrition facts label).
Multilingual Support.
A new user experience is enabled by our adding of Multilingual support. The new AI Model that we are leveraging enables us to index on the meaning of content in Canvas, regardless of the original authored language. This allows for a non-native speaking user of the course language to search for course content using their native language. The supported languages can be found here. Please note that performance may vary across languages.
On-Demand Indexing
A few other workflow changes have been made regarding how and when we prepare course content for searching. The first time search is launched within a course, the launching user will be presented with a UI informing them that the course content is being prepared to search. This should be completed within a few minutes for a majority of courses, depending on the amount of content being indexed. This is a one-time process and subsequent launches of Search will not require this intermediate step to occur. Updates to any course content after the initial indexing will continue to be initiated upon save of that content.
Improved Relevancy Scoring
We changed how we calculate the relevancy score to surface better results.
Less Relevant Results do not appear in default view
After the initial results, a section at the end can be expanded to “Show additional results that may be less relevant”
2024-04-10 |
Updated Features
Additional Content Returned by Search
We expanded the scope of Smart Search functionality, to query against the title and HTML descriptions of course Announcements, Discussion Prompts, and Assignment Details, in addition to Content Pages. Additional data elements such as due dates, replies to Announcements/Discussions and submissions to Assignments are not included in search results at this time.
Updated UI
Our initial UI has been updated to be a little more user friendly and lay the foundation for future updates. It is still very far from our desired production ready UI.
Reduce Total Search Results Returned
We heard customer feedback that returning everything in the course every search is a poor experience. For this update we only return the first 10 results of a search
