# Searching courses via the Open edX API

**URL:** <https://discuss.openedx.org/t/searching-courses-via-the-open-edx-api/10530>\
**Category:** Development\
**Tags:** api\
**Created:** [June 26, 2023, 12:17pm UTC](https://discuss.openedx.org/t/searching-courses-via-the-open-edx-api/10530 "2023-06-26T12:17:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Brian\_Levine](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/discuss.openedx.org/brian_levine/32/5506_2.png) [@Brian\_Levine](https://discuss.openedx.org/u/Brian_Levine)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2023, 12:17pm UTC](https://discuss.openedx.org/t/searching-courses-via-the-open-edx-api/10530/1 "2023-06-26T12:17:36Z")

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I’m using the Open EdX courses API (/courses/v1/courses/) to list courses. This works fine. I noticed that this endpoint supports a “search\_term” query parameter that is not very well documented. Can I search for courses that contains a specific search term in a specific field (like short\_description) perhaps by specifying an Elasticsearch query string? Or does this just search various text fields for the search term?

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**Author:** ![feanil](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/discuss.openedx.org/feanil/32/37_2.png) [@feanil](https://discuss.openedx.org/u/feanil)\
**Post date:** [June 27, 2023, 3:57pm UTC](https://discuss.openedx.org/t/searching-courses-via-the-open-edx-api/10530/2 "2023-06-27T15:57:00Z")

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Hey @Brian_Levine if you have courseware search enabled, you should be able to pass in an elasticsearch query. The code that does it is [here](https://github.com/openedx/edx-platform/blob/master/lms/djangoapps/course_api/api.py#L85).

To help improve the docs, can you tell me which docs were you looking at exactly? Docstrings in the codebase, some docs site, something else?