Search

The ability to search a course is essential: it allows students to find and revisit particular points in the course when they have questions or want to refresh their memories.

How Students Search

In the default Course Builder style, students search via the search bar in the course header.

A search returns results from

• lessons
• announcements
• external links
• YouTube videos (cued to where the search term appears)

Enabling Search

To enable students to search, you must index your course.

Indexing crawls through the publicly available content and creates an index that can be searched against.

Learn more about indexing and searching using Google App Engine’s Search API.

Index Your Course

1. Go to Publish > Search.

2. Click Index Course.

View a course’s search index

1.Go to the Google Developers Console menu

1. Select Compute > App Engine.

2. From the App Engine menu, select Search.

This will show you a list of indexes that exist for the course with the default namespace.

If you have multiple courses, provide the namespace of the course whose index you want to view.

Consider Time and Costs

Note that indexing your course typically takes a while. The time required increases with the amount of course content and the number of languages that the content is available in. Be sure to allow time for indexing to occur in your course release schedule.

In addition, indexing counts against your App Engine quota and can incur costs, so you should only index when content is stable and before you make your course available.

Learn about automatic indexing.