Custom ranking of popular suggestions returned by autocomplete search
By enabling the app’s Instant search widget, your search box will be integrated with the autocomplete search drop-down menu. Autocomplete can offer your customers a list of popular searches that they can select from as they type into the search box.
To adapt our search features to your business, Product Filter & Search provides a Suggestion Dictionary feature that allows you to customize the ranking of popular suggestions returned by autocomplete search. It helps you streamline autocomplete’s popular suggestions to increase the visibility of some product lines and display them higher in suggestion results.
For example, when customers type “hat”, they will receive a list of suggestions, including "bucket hat", "cowboy hat", and "straw hat". With this configuration, when they search for “hat”, “cowboy hat” will be put at the top of popular suggestions, and the list offered will end with “bucket hat”.
On this page
- How autocomplete search displays popular suggestions
- Customize the ranking of popular suggestions returned by autocomplete search
- Import and export your Suggestion Dictionary
How autocomplete search displays popular suggestions
When your search box is integrated with our Instant search widget. There are two factors influencing the ranking of popular suggestions which are displayed by autocomplete.
- Priority level: How each record is set at a priority level decides how they will be displayed in suggestion results. There are 3 priority levels that our search features apply to your store data: high, medium, and low. High-priority records are displayed before ones with medium and low priority.
- Source index: when defined records share the same priority, our autocomplete functionality will look into their source index, meaning where it will pull suggestions from.
- Original store data: Popular suggestions can be proposed based on the original data collected from your store. This type of data will automatically clean up after 3 months. The default priority level of records pulled from this data source is medium, with the lowest relevance.
- Analytics data: Our autocomplete functionality can leverage Analytics data to offer popular suggestions. Our Analytics data can deliver insights on the top 500 most popular search suggestions. These data are cleaned up automatically after 3 months when no longer correct. By default, popular suggestions based on Analytics data have medium priority, with medium relevance.
- Suggestion dictionary: Once you have configured your Suggestion Dictionary index, autocomplete search will start building suggestions pulled from this source index. Each record that you create in this index will have higher priority than those from the two above source indices.
Note: Our search functionalities also use other algorithms to optimize the relevance of suggestions returned by autocomplete.
To give you a better demonstration, every time autocomplete displays a list of popular suggestions, the order of them is as the following:
- Records with high priority in Suggestion Dictionary.
- Records with medium priority in Suggestion Dictionary.
- Records with medium priority from Analytics data.
- Records with medium priority from your original store data.
- Records with low priority in Suggestion Dictionary.
Customize the ranking of popular suggestions returned by autocomplete search
When you want autocomplete search to display a phrase at the top of the popular suggestion results, you can set it at a high or medium priority level in Suggestion Dictionary.
If you want to hide them from the list of suggestion results, you can set their priority level as low in Suggestion Dictionary.
To customize the ranking of popular suggestions returned by autocomplete search from the app dashboard:
Note: The following tutorial requires the Instant search widget integration into your search box with the Popular suggestions component enabled.
1. From the app’s admin, go to Search > Suggestion Dictionary.
Import and export your Suggestion Dictionary