AutoComplete with Suggestion Groups

While Otis is talking about our new Search Analytics (it’s open and free now!) and Scalable Performance Monitoring (it’s also open and free now!) services at Lucene Eurocon in Barcelona Pascal, one of the new members of our multinational team at Sematext, is working on making improvements to our search-lucene.com and search-hadoop.com sites.  One of the recent improvements is on the AutoComplete functionality we have there.  If you’ve used these sites before, you may have noticed that the AutoComplete there now groups suggestions.  In the screen capture below you can see several suggestion groups divided with pink lines.  Suggestions can be grouped by any criterion, and here we have them grouped by the source of suggestions.  The very first suggestion is from “mail # general”, which is our name for the “general” mailing list that some of the projects we index have.  The next two suggestions are from “mail # user”, followed by two suggestions from “mail # dev”, and so on.  On the left side of each suggestion you can see icons that signify the type of suggestion and help people more quickly focus on types of suggestions they are after.

Sematext AutoComplete Suggestion Grouping

The other interesting thing you can see in this AutoComplete implementation is a custom footer, which allows one to show any sort of messaging or even advertising to the end user.  We should also point out that one can use Sematext AutoComplete to embed custom suggestions, such as ads, and have them show up in the list of suggestions only when their (meta) data matches the input, yet displayed differently from the rest of suggestion in order to make it clear they are ads and not ordinary suggestions.

We hope you find this functionality useful.  Please let us know what you think and if you have other suggestions for how to improve either AutoComplete or search-lucene.com and search-hadoop.com, please let us know – we do listen!