Smart Search Feedback from an Instructor

[sfielder]

I'm an instructional designer, and I got some good feedback from one instructor who used Smart Search. Here are his comments. IDK if I'm putting this feedback in the right place, but if it needs to be posted elsewhere, let me know.

sue

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The idiosyncrasies I mentioned relate to search results I can't explain. For example: in my canvas shell "Master: ENGL 1010 3wk Nicholas Salestrom", when I SmartSearch the term "him/her", it gives me the following results:

When I jump into the 1.1.VIDEO page, however, the searched-for text ("him/her") does not show up:

Is the system reading the captioning? Did I literally say "him slash her"? I don't know. But this is clearly doing something MORE than a simple keyword search.

It gets more interesting, still.  Further down the results page (beyond the end of my first screenshot above), SmartSearch flagged an all-text page in that course. Well, I followed the link to that page (which, again, is nothing but text), and ran a CTRL+F search... and found no use of 'him/her'. So why is SmartSearch flagging this page as one of the results?

That's what's still got me scratching my head.

[smasongarrison]

I'd like to piggyback on this feedback. The smart search also provides students access to announcements and other content that hasn't been made available to the students.

It allows students to see the contents of the file.

[reynlds]

I can confirm that Smart Search does show a summary of the items in the results, but limits access to the actual item (announcement example attached).