User Generated Suggestions
Your box already suggests as you type — that's the built-in suggest feature you met on the first page, and it's what powers the autocomplete you just built. It completes from the words already in your records. User Generated Suggestions is a different, optional feature that makes those suggestions get better on their own, by learning from what real visitors search for.
How it works
Turn UGS on for a list, and Search Stack watches the searches people run against it. When a search succeeds — it returned results, was long enough to be meaningful, maybe led to a click — that exact phrase is captured into a list of its own.
Point suggest at that list (on its own, or blended into your group) and your typeahead starts offering real-world phrasing you never typed in by hand — long-tail wording like "movies with chris hemsworth". You decide what counts as "good enough" to capture, so typos and dead-end searches never make it in.
Turn it on
Open the movies list, choose Options, then Enable U.G.S. You'll see the capture rules:
| Rule | What it does |
|---|---|
| Target list | The list captured phrases are stored in — the one you'll point suggest at. |
| Minimum result count | Only capture a search that returned at least this many results — so "asdfgh" (zero results) is never saved. |
| Minimum characters | Ignore very short searches like "a" or "th". |
| Created suggestion is active | On: captured phrases go live immediately. Off: they wait for you to approve them — a moderation step. |
| Require click | Only capture a search if the visitor actually clicked a result — the strongest signal it was a good search. |
Save, and capture begins. There's nothing else to wire up — it works off the searches already hitting your list.
See it in action
A visitor searches "movies with chris hemsworth" and gets a good page of results. That whole phrase — something you'd never have added as a suggestion yourself — gets captured. The next person who starts typing movies with chris is offered it.
The more your box is used, the smarter its suggestions become, all from real usage.
Two features left on the build. Next we give the search a geographic dimension, so visitors can find a cinema near them.
The capture rules, moderation and how the captured list feeds typeahead are covered in the User Generated Suggestions reference (and the plain suggest API it feeds).