There are multiple elements that can be suggested in the Autocomplete. Based on best practices, we recommend suggesting keywords and products.

Product suggestions - When a user starts typing letters in the search box, after the 2nd letter, Nosto’s search starts suggesting products that match the entered phrase. Suggested products are the same products that would be found in the search results page if searched, therefore, the same merchandising is applied.

Keywords suggestions - When a user starts typing letters in the search box, after the 2nd letter Nosto’s search starts suggesting keywords that match the entered phrase. Keywords are generated only from product data. Large assortments ecommerce companies like Amazon or Zalando widely use this approach. You can choose the fields that are being used to generate the keywords in the "Search&Categories -> Settings -> Searchable fields" section of you Admin UI depending on your data.

Example:

Keywords suggestions within a category - same as the feature above but adding a category to the keyword suggestion. For example, if a user searches for dress, the keyword can probably suggest this keyword in different categories like dress in Evening Dresses, dress in Petite Dresses, dress in Prom Dresses.

Enabling the checkbox in "Search&Categories -> Settings -> Autocomplete", adds an extra step to keyword generation - Once keywords are generated, the product index is queried with each keyword as search query and category facets are requested. This way the top 5 categories (containing the highest amount of products for the generated keyword) for the specific query are added to the response from the Search API. It’s then up to the frontend implementation how this information should be displayed. For example, you could decide to always pick the top category for a query and display it.

Generating most meaningful suggestions - you know best how product data is curated in your shop. Therefor Nosto allows you to specifically select the data fields that should be used for the keyword generation by our engine. Simply navigate to "Search&Categories -> Settings -> Searchable fields" and check the related boxes.
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We recommend to use 3-5 fields that contain the most concise product data.

Usually, the autocomplete shows up after a few first letters are typed, but it can also show up when an empty search box is clicked. In this case, Nosto’s Search can suggest:

You can suggest content in your Autocomplete with Nosto’s On Content Personalization (OCP) module. Simply create a campaign and add the placement to your Autocomplete via search’s code editor (Search → Templates) or search API.