Smart Search

Smart Search is a local plugin for Moodle™ that adds a fast, command-palette-style search experience to help users find courses, activities, users, settings, categories, plugins, and admin pages more quickly.

It is designed for day-to-day Moodle navigation. Instead of clicking through multiple menus or administration pages, users can open Smart Search, type a keyword, and jump directly to the result they need.

Main features

• Instant search suggestions while typing.
• Search across courses, activities, users, course categories, settings, plugins, and admin pages.
• Dedicated results page with category filters.
• Quick actions based on Moodle permissions and capabilities.
• Keyboard-friendly command-palette experience using Ctrl+K / Cmd+K.
• Configurable search categories for site administrators.
• Optional anonymous search analytics.
• Indexing tools for administrators.
• Moodle Privacy API support.

How it works

Smart Search builds and maintains a searchable index of Moodle content metadata. Administrators can control which types of content are searchable from the plugin settings page.

When Smart Search is enabled, Moodle Global Search is disabled automatically so users have one consistent search experience.

Typical use cases

• Quickly finding a course without browsing course categories.
• Jumping to an activity or resource inside a course.
• Finding users when permitted by role capabilities.
• Opening Moodle administration and plugin settings pages faster.
• Understanding common search behavior through optional anonymous analytics.

Requirements

• Moodle 4.5 or later.
• MySQL or MariaDB with FULLTEXT index support.

Smart Search is built as a Moodle local plugin and follows Moodle capability checks so search results and actions are shown according to the user's permissions.