MOC — Search UX and Discovery
Map of content covering autocomplete, spelling correction, synonyms, faceted search, zero results, and search UX patterns.
Autocomplete / Suggestions
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Concept: Autocomplete — prefix trie, neural suggestions, UX patterns
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Bootstrapping Autosuggest — Giovanni Fernandez-Kincade: goals and metrics first
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13 Design Patterns for Autocomplete Suggestions — Baymard: 27% get it wrong; 9 UX patterns
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Series (Giovanni Fernandez-Kincade):
- Building an Autosuggest Corpus (Parts 1 & 2)
- Autosuggest Retrieval Data Structures & Algorithms
- Autosuggest Ranking
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How to Really Scale Autocomplete — bonsai.io; search_as_you_type + significant_terms agg; views as relevance signal; 416 RPS at 45ms p99 on 6M docs
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LLM-Powered Query Extraction for Autocomplete — David Albrecht; GPT-4.1-nano on WANDS; LLM-generated queries solve cold-start for under $5
Spelling Correction
- Concept: Spelling Correction — Norvig’s algorithm, SymSpell, context-aware
- How to Write a Spelling Corrector — Norvig’s classic probabilistic algorithm; 21 lines of Python
- 1000x Faster Spelling Correction Algorithm - SymSpell — Wolf Garbe: O(1) via delete-only preprocessing
- Modeling Spelling Correction for Search at Etsy — industry application at scale
Synonyms
- Concept: Synonyms — lexical vs. semantic synonyms; index-time vs. query-time expansion
- Real Talk About Synonyms and Search (Tunkelang)
- Boosting the Power of Elasticsearch with Synonyms
Faceted Search
- Concept: Faceted Search — dynamic filters, constraints vs. preferences, taxonomy
- Facets of Faceted Search (Tunkelang)
- Facets: Constraints or Preferences? (Tunkelang)
- 7 Filtering Implementations That Make Macy’s Best-in-Class (Baymard)
Zero Results
- Concept: Zero Results — causes and recovery strategies; findability pillar
- Search UX: 6 Essential Elements for ‘No Results’ Pages (Baymard)
- Strategies for Using Alternative Queries to Mitigate Zero Results
Query Types and UX
- Deconstructing E-Commerce Search - The 12 Query Types — Baymard’s e-commerce query taxonomy
- Broad and Ambiguous Search Queries — Tunkelang on broad query challenges
- Targeting Broad Queries in Search — Etsy approach
A/B Testing and Experimentation
- Concept: A-B Testing for Search
- A-B Testing for Search is Different — Tunkelang: session-level analysis
- Common Pitfalls of Search Experimentation