About Search Suggestions

Suggest from the index

These take the result of an index query and build a suggest dictionary from a part of each hit.

You can use this to either build a suggest dictionary based on the whole index, by using "#all" as the query, or to restrict to a subset of the index.

• Index field suggest – Takes the value of an index field. You can enable security for this type of suggest (expand the Build options node). It uses both documents and user security tokens to restrict suggestions. To build suggests on alphanumeric index fields, see also Performance Considerations and Options for Search Suggest.
• Category title suggest – Takes all category titles from a subpath of one category index field.
• Category path suggest – Takes all category paths from a subpath of one category index field.
• CSV index field suggest – Takes one value from a multiencoded CSV field, also known as the "metas" field in the default configuration.
• Related terms suggest – Takes the value of the keyword field.

Suggest from query reporting logs

The option Query reporting suggest automatically builds a suggest dictionary from all stored query logs. These query logs also serve for search reporting (see Analyzing User Queries with Reporters).

Suggest from a custom XML dictionary

If you want to suggest dictionary from an external data source, use the Static XML suggest option:

• Create your own XML dictionary (see XML dictionary structure below).
• Place the XML file on the server hosting the main gateway.

In the Administration Console, add a Static XML suggest and give the path to the XML file, prepending it with "file://" (for example file:///data/mydir/mydictionary.xml).

The root node of the XML file is SuggestDictionary, it contains:

• a set of SuggestDictEntry
• maxEntries
• subExpr
• subString
• permutation (optional, see the Compute permutations option in Configure Build Options)

Each entry of the dictionary is defined by a SuggestDictEntry node, which contains the attributes:

• entry – the expression to match
• score – the score
• display – what must be displayed

A suggest dictionary entry can contain alternative expressions. For example, if you want to add synonyms (“resto” for “restaurants”), you can add a SuggestDictEntryAlternativeForm node inside SuggestDictEntry. This specific node contains two attributes:

• form - the alternative expression to add
• score - the score of the alternative form, if not set we use the score of SuggestDictEntry

Example: Here the Suggest query "a" returns 3 results: “aircraft”, “airlines”, “air”.

Example with extra information: A Suggest dictionary entry can also contain a set of extra information (a set of URL for example), stored in SuggestDictEntryExtraInfo. Extra information are strings associated to each entry. They are returned by the suggest API when doing a query. You can also store the information in SuggestDictEntryKeyValue if you want to store a set of keys/values. In this example, the entries "airport", "air", "aircraft" and "airelles" have extra information.

Suggest from a custom precompiled resource

A static resource suggest takes an already-compiled suggest dictionary as a parameter. This dictionary is loaded by the search server suggest command to answer queries. All the suggest types available in the Administration Console help retrieving the entries that must be compiled to produce this suggest resource.

This suggest dictionary cannot be scheduled or built.