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Catalogue Search

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Hello everyone,

Our catalogue is integrated with LinkedIn Learning, meaning we have thousands of training available for our employees.

As far as I've seen, the catalogue's search bar looks for the word(s) you enter either in the title of the training or in their descripting. This means that if I want to look for Advanced Negotiation, I get 2000 results because of training courses containing the words negotiation and advanced in their descriptions or titles.

Isn't there a way to search using booleans or exact matches? Other search engines allow you to use quotation marks for exact matches (i.e. "Advanced Negotiation" and I would only get training where those words are written together). Others allow you to use booleans such as "AND", "OR" "NOT" (i.e. negotiation AND suppliers would only find training where those two words appear in the title or descriptions).

I hope I've made myself understood and thank you for your help!

Guillem

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Hi Guillem

The catalog uses Full text search to find results - Totara can be using different datbases so the results need to be consistent and the Boolean and exact matches searches may be different between databases.

I tried using Postgres and the results when I searched for a two word item only included results with those two words.. What database are you using?

regards

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Hello Craig,

First of all, thank you very much for your quick reply!

I'm not at all familiar with databases, so unfortunately I don't quite understand what you mean by using postgres ☹

At the end of the day what I wanted to know is if searching through the catalogue could be a little more accurate. As per my previous example, if I (or any employee) enter the words "Advanced Negotiation" in the search bar, I end up getting up to 900 results. Among the many results, I get a training course called "How to give feedback people can actually use" just because that training has the word "negotiation" on its description, but it doesn't contain both words entered on the search bar (negotiation and advanced), and the training has nothing to do with what I'm supposed to be looking for as an employee.

The feedback we've received from employees is that searching through the catalogue returns training courses not at all related with the words entered in the search bar.

Thanks for your help!

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Hi Guillem

Postgres is one of the databases that is able to be used by Totara the other databases are MySQL and Microsoft SQL. Each of the databases has slightly different ways of searching.

You can see what version of database you are using through the Site admin > Server menu

The search will search through the course name and description and find matched for all content . When I tried in my Postgres database both words needed to appear for a result to show.

One way of restricting results is to use course tags or Featured courses and add a filter you can see an example of this in the Academy catalogue on this Totara Community site.

regards

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Thanks again for your answer, Craig! Really appreciate it! It is clear now.

I'll check this with our Totara Partner company here in Spain.

Best regards,

Guillem

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