Search functionality in Canvas

Important Notes :

  1. Check your course Settings: if this is set to anything other than 'Course', your Canvas course may be 'findable' by people with institional accounts, or the public.
  2. If you do NOT want students to find material within your course, you can exclude it from search results.

 

When searching, think about what you are looking for and how to narrow down the results:

  1. Use the filters, e.g. if you know you are looking for a PDF file, then use the 'type' filter
  2. Refine your search terms to customise your search and get more accurate results:
  • Typing a word (e.g. assignment), will produce a general result.
  • Typing a word or phrase in double quotation marks (e.g. “assignment due date”) will produce an exact result.
  • Adding a wildcard (asterisk) to a word (e.g. assign*) will find all words that contain the specified letters.

 

There are three ways to initiate a search:

  • Global Search on the dark blue global navigation menu
  • Search tool on the course navigation menu within a course
  • Search field at the top right of the screen 

Use the Global Search on the dark blue global navigation menu

Enter your search term and press Enter or click on the magnifying glass. Your search is now at the account level, as opposed to within any particular course. You can filter per type of item (e.g. Announcements, Assignments, Discussions etc), by term, or by relevance/recency.

 

Use the Search tool on the course navigation menu or the search field within a course

Enter your search term and press Enter or click on the magnifying glass.

The first attempt searches only within the current course.  

On the results page, various filters appear which allow you to refine your search, or search more broadly than the current course.

The Course filter can be set to search across:

  • Current course (the course I am currently accessing)
  • My courses (all courses on which I am enrolled)

You can also refine your search by type of object (e.g. Pages, Files, Assignments), relevance/recency, or courses (search within the current course, or across all courses that you are enrolled on):

 

Note:

  • Search does not have suggestive feedback like Google, which means you should refine your search (as suggested above) in order to achieve more manageable results.
  • Searching for a file: use either the full file name and extension, e.g.my_handbook.docx (or a wildcard, e.g. *handbook.docx) and the file must be published. 
  • Materials in courses that are concluded or expired will NOT be found in a search. This may not occur in your role, but it is expected behaviour.