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.

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:

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:

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

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:

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.

Allows approximate matching. The higher the distance the more approximate the match.

For more information about approximate matching, see Approximation.

Appends suggest results to the last query word entered in the search field to autocomplete it.

It only applies to suggests built with the Subexpr matching or Substring matching build options.

Discards the leftmost word of the query progressively.

It sends each new subquery to the suggests until you reach the max number of suggestions, or until there is no more word to use.

For example, for a query "A B C", the suggest is called 3 times, with "A B C", "B C", and "C".

Subexpr and Substring matching

Normally, suggest matching is prefix-based: "first" returns entries "first test" and "first image".

Sometimes, you want to be able to do a wider matching, not always prefix-based.

Sentence split and Ngram split

For performance reasons, use these options to avoid long entries. By "long", we mean entries longer than 100 characters (100 bytes).

Sentence and ngram split options allow you to break up a suggest entry into several entries, and to perform matches independently on the chunks.

Note: 0 means no splitting.

Computes all permutations for an entry and adds them as separate entries. For example, if you start entering "Angeles", Exalead CloudView automatically suggests "Los Angeles".

This action is performed after the sentence split if the Sentence split option is selected.

To apply permutation to Static XML suggest and Static resource suggest types, you need to add permutation="true" to the SuggestDictionary tag in your XML file or suggest resource in the Business Console.

The maximum number of characters in a suggest entry.

This is a security measure to prevent overly long entries. They are automatically truncated after the specified length.

0 means no limit.

The maximum number of suggestions that can be shown to the user for a given input string. You cannot change this dynamically.

Specifies the Tokenization configuration to use.

This option strips the entry of punctuation, and encloses any UQL operators in quotes.

It is useful when you want to suggest among a list of product references containing "-" (hyphens) or other delimiters, and you do not want any tokenization on these characters.

Triggers a build automatically after the index refreshes.

Makes use of documents and users’ security tokens to restrict suggestions.

string

The input query

integer

(0, 1, 2)

The suggest dictionaries supports fuzzy matching at runtime. This specifies the maximum Levenshtein distance between the input string and the suggestion. 0 means exact match

integer

Only searches for distance 1 fuzzy matches if the original word in the query is at least N characters long. This avoids too much approximation on very short words. The suggested value is 3.

integer

Only searches for distance 2 fuzzy matches if the original word in the query is at least N characters long. This avoids too much > approximation on very short words. The suggested value is 6.

string

Specify a Search Logic name.

true/false Boolean

Displays exhaustive results.

true/false Boolean

Suggests new matches on query words recursively.

true/false Boolean

Suggests matches for the last word only.

string

(xml or json)

Output format:

Other search output format such as csv, flea, and atom, are not supported.

Note: The Accept HTTP header is also taken into account if output is not specified.

string

When using JSON output, the name of a Javascript function to call. The returned Javascript fragment is "callback && callback(json_object)".

Sends the whole query to the default suggest if the cursor is outside a prefix handler.

For example, if the query is:

If the cursor is after the last quote, you are outside the author: prefix handler scope, and:

Sends the query to the default suggest if the cursor is within an undefined prefix handler.

If cleared, undefined prefix handlers are ignored and there is no suggestions.

Adds quotes where required so that the whole suggestion is included in the prefix handler.

Adds prefix handlers automatically when you enter a query

Selecting specific search logics allows prefix handler suggestion and configuration check while configuring prefix handler/suggest pairs below.

Allows you to define a maximum number of suggestions to be displayed (default is 0, meaning no limit).

Allows to retrieve the best matches for each suggest according to the maximum number of suggestions defined previously.

Example: a suggest dispatcher is configured to display 10 suggestions maximum, for 3 suggest dictionaries.

Without Boost variety, you get:

With Boost variety, you get:

Maps a prefix handler to a suggest dictionary. You can map as many pairs as required.

Select Default to specify the suggest dictionary to use by default for a specific prefix handler.

If required, define a maximum number of suggestions to be displayed for each prefix handler in the Max. suggestions field.