Learn from what people search for

Make the box get better on its own, without writing a single new suggestion.

Two different things. Suggest is the as-you-type API behind your typeahead; it completes from the words already in your records. User Generated Suggestions (UGS) is an optional feature that fills 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 run against it. A search that succeeds — returned results, was long enough, maybe led to a click — is captured into a list of its own. Point suggest at that list, alone or blended into the group you built, and your typeahead starts offering real-world phrasing you never typed in: “movies with chris hemsworth”. You set the bar for 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 off the searches already hitting your list. There's nothing else to wire up.

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