Auto-Suggest

Site Search > Recommendations > Auto-Suggest

The SearchStax Site Search solution’s Auto-Suggest feature helps website visitors by suggesting search terms based on an index of past user search queries.

How it Works

  • Indexes Previous Queries: Auto-Suggest uses a list of queries from previous website visitors to find leading-character matches to the visitor’s input. At the same time, the system also performs a “fuzzy” match comparison between the input and previous keywords, testing whether the new input might be misspelled.
  • Real-time suggestions: As visitors type in the search bar, the system suggests queries matching the characters entered. This helps users discover relevant content faster.

Key Benefits

  • Selecting a query helps users find pertinent keywords and avoid typos/misspellings.

Setting up Auto-Suggest

To set up Auto-Suggest, follow this procedure:

  1. Navigate to Site Search > Recommendations > Auto-Suggest.
  2. Select the Enable Auto-Suggest checkbox.
  3. The Suggestion Method droplist offers one setting: Search History. Auto-Suggest draws suggestions from analytics data, manually entered items, and uploaded lists. There is no choice to make here.
  4. The Display Suggestions per Search control lets you set the number of suggestions.
  5. The Display Suggestions After Characters control sets the minimum number of characters a visitor must type before suggestions begin to appear.

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.

The Save Draft button persists your changes to the list. The Publish button makes the changes visible to end users.

Upload Suggestions

You can upload a file of suggestions in .TXT format.

  • Put one suggestion on each line.
  • 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).

The Save Draft button persists your changes to the list. The Publish button makes the changes visible to end users.

Suggestions List

The table at the bottom of the screen displays the suggestions that you have entered manually or by uploading a file. It does not display the suggestions derived from historical analytics data.

  1. At the left are checkboxes where you can select one or more suggestions for global operations (such as delete).
  2. Click on a column heading to re-sort the table by the values in that column.
  3. 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.

Questions?

Do not hesitate to contact the SearchStax Support Desk.