Autosuggest and Synonyms Coming Soon for Search

Soon we will be rolling out another update to the GeorgiaGov web platform that will have immediate benefits to all our platform websites — and may require a little bit of content cleanup for our agency web managers, as well.

Search with Autosuggest

The new functionality will add an autosuggest feature to your website’s search bar. That means when you start typing text into the search box on your site, the system will provide real time suggestions of content on the website that matches that term. You can see it in action now on Georgia.gov and on the Georgia Department of Revenue website.

For example, let’s say I want more information on registering a new vehicle with the Department of Revenue. If I go to dor.georgia.gov and start to type “register” into the search box, a dropdown list appears with suggested published web pages that match the term “register” in either the Title, part of the body text, or the Synonym field (more on that one in a minute).

So I never even have to perform a full search — if I see what I need in the list below, I can just click the link and off I go.

When we launch the new functionality, this autosuggest feature will start working for your site right away, with no work needed on your part. One thing to be aware of is that ALL published pages will show in this list if their term matches — even pages that are published but not linked from the menu. So we recommend you review your list of published content from the backend to confirm that you don’t have any duplicated pages on your site.

Synonyms

In addition, if you want to add extra value to the auto-suggest, you can further tune the results by adding common search phrases to the new Synonym field for key pages on your site. If you find from your Google Analytics that more people use the search phrase “how to register my car” rather than typing “vehicle registration” or “register” when they are looking for vehicle registration, you can add “how to register my car” to the Synonym field for the Vehicle Registration page. Now when I start to type “how to register,” the Vehicle Registration page shows up as a suggestion.

Great! When do we start?

You’ll be notified via email of the projected launch date, but we recommend you review your content before that happens. After we’ve updated the system with the new functionality, you can follow our Knowledge Base on Synonyms for Better Search Suggestions to make your search box even more useful.

Related to: 

• CMS