How does Autocomplete work?
Intelligent Autocomplete is a feature for suggesting search terms as the visitor is typing. It uses machine learning to predict the most relevant suggestions for the specific engine.
Based on previous visitor behavior and successful searches combined with result titles, Intelligent Autocomplete will predict the most likely search term for the visitor and will adjust the suggestions as they continue to enter characters into the search input.
Example
As a user types in “pho”, the intelligent autocomplete could suggest the following list of search terms:
Phone prices
Best phones to buy
iPhone
Photography courses
The suggestions are prioritized as follows:
- Query clicks – The more clicks, the more likely a suggestion is to appear
- Query age – Recent queries are prioritized over older queries. Especially queries from the last 30 days are considered more relevant
- Titles – Titles are always prioritized lower, to ensure previous queries are shown over titles
Intelligent Autocomplete also leverages fuzziness, allowing relevant suggestions to still show up despite typos. The default fuzziness is 1, meaning one character is allowed to be off for the suggestion to still appear. The fuzziness value can be changed by request. You can contact support to change the value.
The suggestions are reset nightly.
Can I disable autocomplete?
It is possible to disable autocomplete by adding disableAutocomplete: true to the cludoSettings object of your script. Don’t hesitate to contact support if you need assistance with this.
How autocomplete filtering works with titles
Intelligent Autocomplete can show suggestions from two sources:
- Previous searches (queries visitors have run before)
- Titles (titles of indexed pages).
When both are enabled together, the autocomplete dropdown mixes previous searches and titles. In that setup, filtering is not supported when previous searches and titles are shown together.
To use autocomplete filters, the autocomplete configuration must be set to only display Titles (not a mix of previous searches and titles). This is an account-level setting that Cludo applies on the backend; it is not something you can switch in the search script or in MyCludo yourself. If you would like this change applied to your account, contact Cludo Support. Note: the change applies to all engines within your account.
When autocomplete is set to titles only, engine filters (for example domain) apply to the autocomplete suggestions. Only titles that match the engine’s filters are shown. That way, if you have multiple subsites or segments with separate engines and one crawler indexing all content, each engine’s autocomplete will only suggest titles from content that matches that engine’s filters—so visitors see suggestions that lead to results on their current site.