Auto-Suggest Search Textbox?

[olimits7]

Hi,

I was just wondering does anyone use an auto-suggest search textbox on their website?

Similar to the one Google has...

Do you feel this has helped increase sales?

I'm thinking about adding this "auto-suggest" feature to search, but want to see if it's even worth adding.

Thank you,

olimits7

[jecasc]

I added this in my online shop two years ago and I have received only positive feedback. I sell a lot of products from different countries and customers are not always familiar with the exact spelling. So it helps a lot if they have only to enter three or four letters of a product name and it shows up already.

The search that comes with most shopping carts is simply too stupid, usually with no margin of error. A simple typo on the customers side and he might not find a certain product although you are selling it.

[jwolthuis]

I tried this on our shop for a few months, in lieu of full-text searching. It failed in cases where the customer used slightly-different phrasing. For example, if I sold "Light Blue Widget", it would fail to suggest it when the customer typed "widget..." or "blue...".

Full-text search is much better, as it'll account for plurals ("Widgets") or different phrasing ("Small Blue Widget"), and order results according to match strength. Plus, if you use SQL Server Express, it's free.