The SearchStax Site Search solution’s Hosted Search Experience provides a headless Javascript Based Search Interface for your Site Search App. It serves PCs, tablets, and mobile platforms with equal facility.
The Hosted Search Experience is a Profile-level feature.
The Hosted Search Experience allows users to:
- Search using keywords
- View a Smart Answers AI-based response when the query takes the form of a question
- Show search results in grid or list format
- Track searches and clicks for analysis
- Search with auto-suggest/auto-complete feature
- Show facets (filter lists) as configured in Site Search
- Pagination of search results
- Result sorting by customizable options
- Show did-you-mean suggestions for misspellings
- Show related searches
- Show external promotions
- Ability to submit feedback for tracking and analytics
- Ability to switch between search profiles for testing
- Ability to search by proximity to a geographic location
Empty Searches (*) in Analytics
An asterisk (*) represents an empty search request. In Hosted Search Experience v3, an initial empty search may run on page load to retrieve prerequisites such as facets or locations. Empty searches typically come from one of the following situations:
- Submitting the search form with no input.
- Whitespace-only input is trimmed before submission.
This is expected behavior and doesn't indicate a bug. It can appear in analytics tables, totals, and trends.
If you maintain a custom UI, you can optionally intercept empty input before submitting a search (for example, with a beforeSearch hook that returns only when the query isn't *). This is custom frontend development and isn't part of the default SearchStax configuration. If you do this, make sure your result containers and UI components still refresh correctly. For more information, see Using Hooks.
Implementation
Each Site Search App has its own Hosted Search app out of the box. To access it, go to Site Search > Configurations > Search UI > Hosted Search Experience.
The Hosted Search Experience is preconfigured to provide an appropriate search experience to the Search Experience’s index and settings. Click the View button to open the Hosted Search Experience in a browser window. You can copy the URL to share with stakeholders and coworkers.
Each time you update the Search Experience in any way, click the Regenerate button before using it.
Using the Model Parameter
Note that the Hosted Search Experience is configured for a specific search profile (or “model”), as shown by the searchstax[model]=modelName parameter at the end of the URL. This provides a convenient way for developers to test competing models side-by-side.
Questions?
Do not hesitate to contact the SearchStax Support Desk.