We recently released an autocomplete feature that’s been picked up by many of our clients. This uses previous user’s searches (in aggregate) to automatically create keyword suggestions, which are then displayed in order of popularity. It is really fast too. Head over to surveillance-video.com if you want to see it in action.
Prior to the release we had trouble estimating how often people would use it. We couldn’t find any usage stats out there we could use as a baseline. While it is still early days, it is currently being used 20% of the time, and on average people are saving themselves from typing about eight characters each time. Saving a few keystrokes is great, but the real benefit appears to be helping people use search terms that are hard to spell – spelling suggestions are required much less often on sites with this technology. This means more people are finding what they want the first time, which has to be a good thing.
Tags: autocomplete, statistics, usage
July 3rd, 2008 at 1:26 pm
I really like this new functionality. This is a great example of the incremental improvement that SLI customers get at no charge. I’ve blogged about a number of other sites that have similar functionality: You Tube, Yahoo Search Suggest, and Apple. Now you will see auto complete on more and more sites – as we roll it out to our customers and as more and more sites start using our services.
July 16th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
[...] Systems web site | Search this blog: « The benefits of Auto Complete June Newsletter – New Tools for Faster, User-Friendly Search July 15th, 2008 [...]
August 27th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
[...] in their toolbar. We’re recently started offering our equivalent functionality (that we call Auto Complete) to all of our site search customers. This is being well received – so you’ll start to see [...]
October 29th, 2008 at 7:36 am
[...] ha sido bautizada de diferentes maneras, según el fabricante: search-as-you-type, Suggest, auto-complete, [...]
December 16th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
[...] auto complete functionality that we released a few months ago shortens this path further by reducing the number [...]
January 12th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
[...] year we updated our merchandising console, introduced Auto Complete, improved the speed of our search, and upgraded our infrastructure to provide improved redundancy. [...]
March 15th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
[...] auto complete feature helps people formulate their query as they type. The suggested phrases always have [...]
May 5th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
[...] Some other nice to have features that are missing include facets, related searches and auto complete. [...]
May 24th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
[...] over a year, Google recently added suggestions to their home page and we’re offering our Auto Complete to all of our customers (now over 300 sites and growing). John predicted that this functionality [...]
July 15th, 2009 at 11:22 am
[...] useful for large sites. We use these search terms in a variety of creative ways – they populate the auto complete list, the are used to generate related searches which are shown on the search results page, [...]
December 10th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
[...] your site search so that misspelled queries still turn up the correct results. (And consider adding Auto Complete to your site search, which will suggest search terms as customers type – this is a big help for [...]
December 19th, 2009 at 9:10 am
Yeah a couple years of this, and I barely remember searching before this. It not only helps with saving time, but also give relevant queries along with the one you were using to get you better search results.
January 20th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
[...] year saw continuous improvement in site search, particularly in the search interface. We rolled out Auto Complete to most of our clients, and we’re offering it as a standard feature for all new clients. We’ve [...]