User Generated Suggestions
User Generated Suggestions (UGS) build an autocomplete source out of the searches your users actually make. Where Suggestions is the as-you-type API that serves typeahead, UGS is one way to fill the list it serves from: turn it on and the phrases people successfully search — long-tail wording like movies with chris hemsworth that you’d never author by hand — get captured into a list of their own. Point suggest at that list and your typeahead learns from real usage, with no work from you.
You control what gets captured with a few rules, so only genuinely useful phrases are kept — not typos, dead ends or single letters.
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Turn it on
- Open the source list (the one your users search) and choose Options → Enable U.G.S.
- Pick a target list — captured phrases are saved there as ordinary records.
- Set the capture rules (below) and save. From then on, qualifying searches flow into the target list automatically.
How it works
- A user searches the source list, and the query passes your capture rules.
- The query text is written as a new record into the target list.
- You serve that list as typeahead through the suggest API — directly, or blended into a group — so the next user who starts typing a similar phrase sees it.
Capture rules
| Rule | What it does |
|---|---|
| Minimum result count | Only capture a query that returned at least this many results — a phrase that found nothing is a dead end, not a suggestion. |
| Minimum length | Ignore very short fragments that make poor suggestions. |
| Created suggestion is active | Whether a captured phrase goes live immediately, or waits inactive for you to approve it — the moderation switch. |
| Require click | Only keep a phrase if the user actually clicked a result — proof the search led somewhere useful, not just somewhere populated. |
Because the target is an ordinary list, everything you know about lists still applies: you can review, edit or delete captured phrases in the console, and the standard versioning and contributor rules hold.
A worked example
Your film site has a movies list people search, and an empty movie-suggestions list. You enable UGS on movies, target movie-suggestions, and set the rules to at least one result, at least five characters, require a click, start inactive. Over a week your users type things you’d never have thought to author — underrated 90s thrillers, movies like inception — and each phrase that found films and got a click lands in movie-suggestions, waiting for a quick approve. You skim the list, activate the good ones, and point your search box’s autocomplete at movie-suggestions. Now the box suggests your own users’ best phrases back to everyone — your autocomplete wrote itself.