The SearchStax Site Search solution's Auto-Suggest feature helps website visitors by suggesting search terms based on an index of past user queries. See our Auto-Suggest video for a brief demonstration.
Auto-Suggest is an App-level feature.
How It Works
- Indexes Previous Queries: Auto-Suggest maintains an index of queries from previous website visitors to find:
- Leading-character matches that could complete the visitor’s input. In the example above, the system suggests queries that began with “sit.”
- The system also performs a fuzzy-match comparison between the input and previous query keywords, testing whether the new input might be misspelled. In the example, the system has found a keyword that contains “s”, “i”, and “t”, although not in the order typed by the visitor.
- Real-time suggestions: The system responds to user keystrokes in real time, helping users discover relevant content faster.
Key Benefits
- Selecting a query helps users find pertinent keywords and avoid typos/misspellings.
Setting Up Auto-Suggest
For new apps, Auto-Suggest is disabled by default. To use Auto-Suggest in a new app, go to Site Search > Optimizations > Auto-Suggest, turn on Enable Auto-Suggest, and then click Publish.
- Go to Site Search > Optimizations > Auto-Suggest.
- Turn on Enable Auto-Suggest.
- The Suggestion Method droplist offers two mechanisms: data and dictionary. Data allows suggestions to be based on user search behavior. Dictionary uses the list of words on this page.
- The Display Suggestions per Search control lets you set the number of suggestions.
- The Display Suggestions After Characters control sets the minimum number of characters a visitor must type before suggestions begin to appear.
How Ranking Works
Auto-Suggest orders suggestions by weight, highest first.
If you use the Data + Dictionary suggestion method, the suggestions can come from two sources, and each source contributes to ranking differently:
- Dictionary suggestions: Suggestions added manually in Studio or uploaded from a file receive a default weight of
100. These usually appear above lower-weight data-driven suggestions. - Data-driven suggestions: These are built from recent user search behavior. Auto-Suggest rebuilds this suggestion data nightly using the last three months of search queries with click-through rate greater than 10%.
If two suggestions share the same prefix, the one with the higher weight appears first.
Add a Suggestion
The Add Word field lets you manually enter suggestions one by one. Type in the word or phrase and click the (+) button.
Click the Save Draft button before you leave or refresh a page. Otherwise, changes can be lost. The Publish button makes the changes visible to end users.
When you save a draft, Site Search shows a blue dot in the navigation menu to indicate pending changes for the current app, language, and search profile. The configuration page also shows a banner. Status banners show pending draft, saved draft, and published states.
Upload Suggestions
You can upload a file of suggestions in .txt format. Use one suggestion per line. Don’t include a header row or commas. Save the file as plain text with a .txt extension.
product catalog
account dashboard
pricing guide
support portalSite Search treats each line as one dictionary suggestion.
- Put one suggestion on each line.
- Use the same capitalization and spacing that you want users to see in the suggestion.
- Duplicate suggestions are ignored.
- Maximum file size is 10 MB.
- Site Search can accommodate 35,000 added suggestions (in addition to the historical search strings from analytics).
- Special characters in suggestions are preserved (for example, parentheses (), ampersands &, and symbols like !, @, #, $, %, and ^).
After upload, review the suggestions list. Click the Save Draft button before you leave or refresh a page so changes aren't lost. The Publish button makes the changes visible to users.
When you save a draft, Site Search shows a blue dot in the navigation menu to indicate pending changes for the current app, language, and search profile. The configuration page also shows a banner. Status banners show pending draft, saved draft, and published states.
Suggestions List
The table at the bottom of the screen displays the suggestions that you've entered manually or by uploading a file. It doesn't display the suggestions derived from historical analytics data.
Note: A suggestion that appears first in live Auto-Suggest results might not appear first in this table. The table only shows manually managed dictionary entries. Live results can also include data-driven suggestions, and the API orders all returned suggestions by weight.
- At the left are checkboxes where you can select one or more suggestions for global operations (such as delete).
- Click on a column heading to re-sort the table by the values in that column.
- On the right are controls to:
- Filter the list by searching for a keyword.
- Download the suggestions to a TXT file. The download contains only the suggestions entered/uploaded manually, not those derived from analytics data.
- Delete selected synonyms.
Troubleshooting
If you have issues with this feature, see Auto-Suggest Issues in the SearchStax Help Center.