Autocomplete search suggestions have become increasingly popular on e-commerce sites over the past years, and our benchmark documents that search autocompletes are now used at 90% of major e-commerce sites. Precisely because autocomplete suggestions are so common, users also have fairly well-established expectations of how the autocomplete widget will work. When these expectations are violated, the user’s search experience plummets and, in some cases, leads them astray. During our testing, suboptimal autocomplete suggestions sent multiple subjects on detours, often with a completely wrecked search experience or site abandonment as the result.

As autocomplete directly manipulates what users will search for and how they search, it’s one of those features that can do more harm than good if not implemented properly. Users generally expect ”the site to know better”, and during our large-scale testing users were very faithful to the site’s suggestions. Therefore the quality and relevance of the autocomplete suggestions should be taken just as seriously as the search results’ quality and relevance.

Learn More: Besides exploring the 854 autocomplete examples below (for general inspiration), you may also want to read our related article “8 Design Patterns for Autocomplete Suggestions”.

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