Learn from what people search for

Your box works. This step makes it get better on its own, without you writing a single new suggestion.

Your box already suggests as you type: that's the built-in suggest feature you met in step 1, 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.

Two different things. Suggest is the as-you-type API that serves your typeahead. User Generated Suggestions (UGS) is a way to fill a list with the phrases people actually search, which you then serve through suggest. One shows completions; the other decides what completions exist.

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 the group you built) 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:

The User Generated Suggestions dialog showing capture rules: target list, minimum result count, minimum characters, active, require click

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.

Checkpoint. Your search box now improves itself from real traffic. One step left: changing your fields later without breaking the box you just shipped.

Go deeper: Capture rules, moderation and how the captured list feeds typeahead in the reference.