Search and discovery (EdTech)

Search and discovery technologies help people find and be exposed to information that they find useful.

Search goes beyond Google searching on the web - a search technology is any software that can help a person look through a collection of documents or media to find relevant information. Search technology can exist on phones, tablets, and computers to help people find files and documents on their device, or they can use search technologies in apps and software to search information about their or other people's participation, such as searching through a discussion forum to see if anyone is discussing certain topics.

For search technologies to work well, they need to be able to read the information. Thus, any text terms that are used for search also requires the items that are being searched to use machine-readable text. This is in contrast to images with text in them, but they were not typed or that the computer doesn't recognize the item as text or words.

In a search and discovery context, documents and informational resources benefit from having additional metadata attached to each item. This includes the item's title, authorship, keywords that describe the item, its contents, any tags or categories that describe the item's contents, or any other information that describes the item. Search technologies can explore the metadata, as well as the contents of the item itself.

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