Auto-Suggest Troubleshooting

SearchStax Site Search solution offers these troubleshooting suggestions for the Auto-Suggest feature.

Troubleshooting

• No suggestions appear: The suggester component sometimes needs to be restarted.
  1. Go to the Site Search Auto-Suggest screen.
  2. Turn off Auto-Suggest by clearing the checkbox.
  3. Click the Publish button. Wait while Site Search responds to this change.
  4. Enable Auto-Suggest again by checking the checkbox.
  5. Publish again.
• Unable to upload Auto-Suggest terms:
  • File size: File size can't exceed 10 MB.
  • File format: Upload a newline-delimited .TXT file.
    • .TXT file requirements:
      • Put one suggestion on each line.
      • Don't include a header row.

    Example TXT file contents:

    product catalog
    account dashboard
    pricing guide
    support portal

• Expected suggestions didn't appear.
  • Auto-Suggest rebuilds data-driven suggestions nightly using the last three months of search queries with click-through rate greater than 10%.
  • Suggestions entered today might not have been indexed yet.
  • Suggestions that appeared yesterday might have timed out (more than three months old).
  • A manually added dictionary term can outrank analytics-driven suggestions because dictionary terms receive a default weight of 100.
  • If you use the Data + Dictionary method, the live order reflects the combined weights of both sources, not just the list of manually entered terms shown in Site Search.
  • After uploading or editing suggestions, click Save Draft and Publish so the changes are visible to users.
• Unwanted or misspelled suggestions appear.
  • Data-driven suggestions: Auto-Suggest uses tracked historical search queries, so an unwanted or misspelled query can later appear as a suggestion. Add the complete word or phrase to Restricted Terms, make sure Auto-Suggest is selected, and publish the change.
  • Dictionary suggestions: Restricted Terms doesn't filter manually added dictionary suggestions. Remove the unwanted entry from the Auto-Suggest suggestions list instead.

  Note: Spell Check correction doesn't by itself change the query your site sends to Analytics. If your implementation tracks the original query, that misspelling can still feed data-driven Auto-Suggest.

• Suggestions seem confusing. The auto-suggest algorithm provides:
  • Up to N partial-match suggestions based on previous searches or words you enter, where "N" is the Suggestions per Search value from the Auto-Suggest tab.
  • The system then adds fuzzy-match suggestions from the same pool to bring the list of suggestions up to five.
  • When there are no partial-match suggestions to display, or not enough of them, the system fills in additional fuzzy matches up to five total.
  • The system returns the "best" fuzzy matches it can find. When the pool of possible matches is small, the best matches can have little similarity to the query. Time will cure this as the search history grows.
  • If you inspect the Auto-Suggest API response, each returned suggestion includes a weight value. Higher weights appear first in the results.

Questions?

Do not hesitate to contact the SearchStax Support Desk.