User Generated Suggestions
An optional feature that fills a list with the phrases real visitors search for, which you then serve through suggest.
- Suggest is the as-you-type API serving your typeahead; it completes from the words already in your records.
- User Generated Suggestions (UGS) decides what completions exist.
How it works
- Turn UGS on for a list and Search Stack watches the searches run against it.
- A search that succeeds — returned results, long enough to be meaningful, maybe led to a click — is captured verbatim into a list of its own.
- Point
suggestat that list, alone or blended into your group, and your typeahead offers long-tail wording you never typed in by hand, like “movies with chris hemsworth”. - You set what counts as good enough, so typos and dead-end searches never make it in.
Turn it on
Open the movies list, choose Options, then Enable U.G.S.
| 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 off the searches already hitting your list. Nothing else to wire up.
Capture rules, moderation and how the captured list feeds typeahead: the User Generated Suggestions reference (and the plain suggest API it feeds).
Next: Geographical search »
Find cinemas near a visitor.