How Autocomplete Suggestions Are Created

For both the list of Popular Searches and type-ahead suggestions in Autocomplete, we utilize the top 5,000 high-quality (see below) suggestions from the search history for your site as logged by Athos Commerce's search tracking.

When fetching these top 5,000 suggestions, they are:

• Sorted by "Average Daily Queries" from the past 90 days.
  • Example: If a query has been searched 125 times in the past 90 days, the "daily average" would be around 1.39.
• If there is a tie of "Average Daily Queries", the final sub-sort is alphabetical.
  • Example:
    • There are 4,000 queries with at least 1.39 searches per day. All of these are included.
    • The next 2,000 queries all have the same score of 0.50 searches per day. Only the first alphabetical half of these will be included to meet the 5,000 needed.
    • The query "baseball caps" (score 0.50) will be included, but not "tee-shirt" (score 0.50), because it is in the second half alphabetically.

"High Quality" suggestions

In order to be considered as an autocomplete suggestion, a query must fulfill the following criteria:

• It cannot have suggested a "Did You Mean?" to the customer in the last 24 hours
• It has had more than zero results in the last 24 hours
• It cannot be an Expanded Search
• It can only include standard alphanumeric characters, spaces, slashes, single/double quotes, hyphens, periods, number signs, and percent signs
• It must be between three and 70 characters long (including spaces)
• It must be no longer than 10 words
• It cannot have any words longer than 20 characters
  • There is an exception for words that have a comma and slash (to prevent blocking chemical names like "3,5-Dinitrobenzoyl")

Normalizing the Suggestions

We then prune the suggestion set that has been gathered.

• If a shopper searched for a query in the last 24 hours, and it generated zero results, then we will omit it as a suggested completion.
• We remove duplicate queries

Because this pruning occurs after we fetch up to 5,000 queries, the final number of available suggestions may be lower than 5,000.