Add auto-suggest to your Drupal searches (optional)


Auto-suggest (or auto-complete) refers to providing a site visitor with suggestions for what keywords to try. This not only helps them save time and avoid typos, but also could provide them with new ideas on what to search for, or how to better phrase what they are looking for. SearchStax Studio provides a very sophisticated algorithm for keyword suggestions, suggesting those combinations of words for which visitors actually clicked any result links. Therefore, enabling auto-suggest with the Studio can be a great addition to your site’s search experience.

If you want to add auto-suggest to searches provided by Drupal directly, then you will need to have the Search API Autocomplete module installed on your site. Once that is done and you have specified the Auto-suggest core in the SearchStax configuration form, you can then configure any search on your site to use auto-suggestions provided by the Studio, by following the steps below:

  1. Navigate to the Administration » Configuration » Search and metadata » Search API configuration page, then proceed to the search index which the search page in question uses and finally to its Autocomplete tab.
  2. There, you see a list of all search pages on your site known to the Search API module. (These are the same ones for which individual analytics keys could be selected above.) If not done already, enable autocomplete for the search in question, then click the Edit button next to it.
  3. On this page, you have many options for customizing autocomplete for this search. To let suggestions be provided by the Studio, check SearchStax as the (or one of the) Enabled suggesters. (If choosing more than one suggester, please also remember to order them as desired with the widget right below the checkboxes.)
  4. Make any other adaptions you want to the autocomplete settings for the search (none of them are specific to SearchStax) and then click Save.

You should now see suggestions when typing into the search’s keywords field, provided by the SearchStax Studio. (On development sites, it could be the case that no suggestions are displayed until enough tracking data, including search result clicks, are available.)

Figure 7: Navigate to the Autocomplete tab of your search index, then enable autocomplete for the search in question and click Edit.
Figure 8: Enable the SearchStax suggester to start providing search suggestions from SearchStudio to your visitors.

Questions?

Do not hesitate to contact the SearchStax Support Desk.