Suggestions

As of Dynamicweb 9.8 the Indexing engine supports ‘Did You Mean’-suggestions – this helps users find what they are looking for even if they make a minor spelling mistake or are not certain how a search term is spelled (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Suggestions

At the technical level, we apply the Lucene SpellChecker against an index document field and – based on the available terms in that field for all documents – find the closest matches using several distance filters.

Implementing “Did you mean”-suggestions is very easy – let’s say you have a free-text search on a website where users search in the following fields:

1. Product name
2. Product number
3. Variant options
4. Short description
5. Long description

For simplicity’s sake these fields have been added to a Summary-field called FreeText – and you want to provide suggestions to a user whenever they search for a term which can’t be found in the index.

1. Open the product catalog app used to publish your products
2. Find the Spell Check section and configure it (Figure 1.2):
   • Field to check: FreeText
   • Query parameter: Search – or whatever your free-text search parameter is called

Figure 1.2 The Spell Check section

3. In the Templates section create or edit the No product found template and render suggestions – see code below for an example: