You can do keyword, wildcard, and phrase searching to narrow results.
Search Type | Example | Finds |
Keyword | strategy | Items that contain the word strategy or a variant. |
Wildcard | strat* | Items that contain words that start with "strat". |
Phrase | “leadership characteristics” | Items that contain exactly the words leadership characteristics. |
To help refine search results further you can filter by content type, by relevance or recency, and by contexts.
Filtering by content type
After a search, a Type filter is displayed below the search box. Click and select a type from the Type filter to narrow your search by a specific type of content. The Type list will show the types of content that were found for a search term and will vary depending on the search.
Figure 1: Type dropdown list
More information on the types of content you can search can be found here.
Sorting by Relevance or Recency
Results are default-ranked according to relevance. The titles of items are weighted more heavily than the body of an item. Sorting by Relevance will return the results that are most relevant to the search terms you entered first. Sorting by Recency will return the items most recently added to Canvas first.
Figure 2: Relevance/Recency dropdown
Filtering by context
You can filter content by different contexts depending on where the search was executed.
Figure 3: Course context dropdown
| Context (All roles) | What content will be displayed? |
| Current course | The current course |
| My courses | The current course and the course(s) you are enrolled in |
| Institution courses* | The current course, my courses, and courses with institution visibility |
| Public courses* | The current course, my courses, courses with institution visibility, and courses with public visibility |
| Context (Admins only) | |
| Current account | The current subaccount and all child subaccounts |
*Please file a support ticket if you would like more information on how to enable Institution and Public search contexts for your institution.
Filter by term (admins)
Canvas admins have the ability to filter by Term when searching at the account level.
