- Within the text
You can find every place where a word or phrase appears within the text that you are currently reading. - In your notes
The search can help you locate the notes where you used a particular word or phrase. - On the internet
You can find websites, videos, and translations with the tools available through the search.
When you search, the system presents a list of pages in the document that scored highly for your search. The following consideration determine a page's score:
- The more times the word or phrase appears on a page, the higher the score.
- Matches on rarer words that you search result in a higher score than matches on the common words.
- If you search for multiple words, pages that contain more of the words receive a higher score.
Searching is available on all text-based documents. Searching is not available for embedded videos or linked content.
Searching in Engage
Use these steps to perform a search:
- If you want to search the content and notes of one course material, open that course material. If you want to search the content and notes of all course materials in your account, perform the search outside of the context of a course material.
- Type the word or phrase you would like to find in the Search field in the header.
- Press Enter.
Engage searches for the word or phrase and presents the most relevant results at the top of the search results. For each result, you'll see the page number and some context around where the word or phrase occurs in the text. From here you can:
- Click a page number to go directly to that page.
- Click the Notes link to see instances of the word or phrase within the notes.
- Click one of the icons on the right to repeat the search for the word or phrase on the internet. You can choose from the following sources:
- Dictionary.com
- Google Translate
- Wikipedia
- YouTube
Advanced Searching Syntax
You can enter special characters into the search bar to find exactly what you are looking for in the content. Your search queries can get very complex. You may have better search results by keeping search queries simple until you become familiar with the syntax.
- Use an asterisk to as a wildcard:
- share*
Returns matches that start with "share" followed by other letters. For example, share, shares, shareholder.
- share*
- Use double-quotes to search for an exact phrase:
- "internal combustion engine"
Returns matches for the entire phrase only - internal combustion engine
Returns matches for internal, combustion, and engine
- "internal combustion engine"
- Use Boolean (true/false) operators:
- internal AND combustion
Returns matches for any pages that contains both "internal" and "combustion" - internal +combustion
Returns the same matches as Internal +combustion - internal OR combustion
Returns matches for any pages that have either internal or combustion - internal NOT combustion
Returns matches for any pages that have internal but do not have a match for combustion - internal -combustion
Returns the same matches as Internal NOT combustion
- internal AND combustion
- Use parentheses to group:
- (internal combustion engine) OR "nuclear fusion"
Returns matches that have any of the following: internal, combustion, engine, or an exact match for nuclear fusion - Unnecessary parentheses: ("internal combustion engine") OR ("nuclear fusion")
The exact phrase match makes the parentheses redundant
- (internal combustion engine) OR "nuclear fusion"