This article outlines how to troubleshoot issues with the search backend related to query suggestions, the feature that suggests queries to autocomplete searches.

Be sure to follow the How to Start Debugging Backend Search Issues help article for general troubleshooting steps first.

 

A blacklisted query is still showing up

As the names might suggest, popularQueriesBlacklistedTerms and popularQueriesBlacklistedRegex only apply to popular queries.

For instructions on how to set block certain query suggestions from appearing, check out this help article.

If the query suggestion is still appearing after blacklisting it:

1. Check to see if there is an entity causing it to appear via a vertical prompt that uses an embedded field. Navigate to Knowledge Graph > Entities and search for the prompt. If there is an entity with that name, your options are:
   1. Edit the entity to change the field to a value that is approved to appear as a prompt.
   2. Delete the entity so the prompt won’t show up at all.
   3. Edit or remove the embedded prompt to prevent the suggestion from appearing. Navigate to Search > Query Suggestions. Switch to the Vertical Prompts tab and select the relevant vertical. Then edit or remove the relevant prompt.
2. If you recently made this change, you’ll have to wait for the site to re-index, which happens on a nightly basis.

 

I’m not getting Query Suggestions in my locale

Query Suggestions uses a list of supported locales defined in the configuration to determine which locales to generate query suggestions for. We’ll automatically generate query suggestions for the primary locale of the account, but you can set other locales. To set another locale:

1. Navigate to Search > [[Experience Name]] > Edit as JSON.
2. Populate the supportedLocales property with a comma-separated list of relevant locales. Make sure each locale is included in quotes. The format should look like:

"supportedLocales": ["de","es"],

 

The font highlighting in Query Suggestions looks inconsistent

We use font highlighting in suggested prompts when there is a matched substring between the query and the prompt. This indicates to a user why a particular prompt is returned for a given query.

If there is a recognized matched substring, we give the matched substring normal highlighting and bold the rest of the prompt that is not part of the matched substring, like in the example below.

Google does the same exact thing in their query suggestions.