Finding Things to Learn: Site-Wide Search

Dan Bader
Welcome to Real Python! Dan Bader 02:06

What is the best way to find things to learn on realpython.com? In this lesson you’ll see how our site-wide search box works, so you can quickly find the courses, tutorials, and other learning content you’re looking for.

The search page gives you filters that narrow the 9,000+ items in the library down to the ones you want, and a sort control that lets you choose which ones you see first:

The Real Python search box and filter sidebar with Courses and Basics ticked, showing how a resource-type filter and a skill-level filter stack together.

You’ll find three groups of filters. On a wide screen they sit beside your results, and on a narrow one they move above them:

  • Resource type: Learning Paths, Articles, Courses, Course Lessons, Quizzes, Coding Exercises, Podcasts, Reference, and Topics
  • Skill level: Basics, Intermediate, or Advanced
  • Status: Bookmarked, Completed, In-Progress, or Not Started, so you can pick up where you left off

The sort control is separate from the filters, and it sits with your results. You start on Relevance, and you can switch to Newest or Recently Viewed.

Tick two options inside the same group and you’ll see more results. Tick options in different groups and you’ll see fewer. So Courses plus Quizzes shows you both, while Courses plus Basics shows you only beginner courses.

Real Python publishes new tutorials and courses multiple times per week, so there’s always something new to find. Sort your results by Newest to see the latest first.

00:00 Now, what is the best way to find things to learn on realpython.com? There are a couple of ways you can slice and dice our content and find exactly the tutorials that will help you the most, anytime you’re browsing the site.

00:12 So, I want to show you how you can do that and what I would personally recommend as the best strategy for maximizing your learning success. As you can see, we have a big search box here at the top.

00:24 This is always available to you no matter what you do on the site, and I would encourage you to use it. Let’s say you wanted to learn about Python decorators.

00:34 Here I’m just going to punch the keyword “decorator” or “decorators” in, hit the Return key, and I get taken to the search results. What you’ll find here is a list of tutorials, courses, quizzes—everything that we have on the site where we think it is relevant to your search query.

00:52 And of course, you can redo your search and, you know, you can search at any time, change the query, search as many times as you want. What I’m seeing here is that there is a video course I can watch on Python decorators.

01:05 There’s also a written tutorial on Python decorators—because it doesn’t say Course, it doesn’t have the play button here. There is other individual courses and lessons that I could watch that talk about decorators, and there’s other articles and other material that also mention decorators and talk about them. In general, we sort this list by the results that we think are the most helpful.

01:30 So, in this case, if you’re interested in decorators, I would encourage you to start with the course or the article, and they’re both connected so you will always be able to find, you know, one from the other. So, in this case here, from the course, I can jump to the article and then the article can bounce me back to the course.

01:50 That is a really, really good way to quickly find the content and quickly survey what is available here on the website. Now, if I search for “oop”, for example, it gives me another list of results, and what I see popping up here is a Learning Path.

Avatar image for Dan Bader

Dan Bader RP Team on April 18, 2020

We’ve just launched a completely new search experience that’s available now for you at realpython.com/search

It’ll be your new jumping off point to explore Real Python’s entire tutorial and course library.

Our goal was to give you a quick and convenient way for finding the Python training resources you need in the moment:

You can easily filter for specific types of content, like written articles and tutorials, video lessons, or coding quizzes. Or combine this with a skill-level filter to get resources matching your level of experience…

And of course there’s still a search box, so you can pull up a list of all Django, OOP, NumPy, etc resources in a jiffy!

We’ve been beta testing the new search feature with the team and in the RP Community Slack for a while. And I think it’s a huge improvement over the previous search UI we had on the site.

Give it a go and let us know what you think :)

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TheWither on April 20, 2020

Great search filter! I think that it is very organized too! Very neat and smart. I like it! :D

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