🚀 Feature: Search autocomplete

[drodil]

🔖 Feature description

The search could suggest searching words using autocomplete. For example, ElasticSearch supports autocomplete to be returned in the response: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-suggesters.html

🎤 Context

For better user experience, the search could propose the search words for the user

✌️ Possible Implementation

Use MUI autocomplete for search input

👀 Have you spent some time to check if this feature request has been raised before?

• I checked and didn't find similar issue

🏢 Have you read the Code of Conduct?

• I have read the Code of Conduct

Are you willing to submit PR?

None

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[drodil]

Not stale, waiting for comments

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[drodil]

Not stale, waiting for comments

[efenner-cambia]

It sounds great to me!

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[drodil]

Not stale, gathering interest

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[camilaibs]

Thanks for opening the issue @drodil 🙌🏻 !
Let's ping @backstage/discoverability-maintainers for hearing their thoughts 🙂

[emmaindal]

Hello @drodil thanks for opening this issue. Just for my own understanding. This feature request is to add auto complete support on the search engines side? The reason why I ask is because we have this AutoComplete component available but if I understand it correctly this is so that this auto complete component can be used with suggested terms?

[drodil]

So idea is to utilize the AutoComplete component for search and provide the suggested terms from the search engine as part of the SearchAPI response. Elastic/OpenSearch supports this out-of-the-box but for other search backends it should probably render nothing or figure a way to do this.

[emmaindal]

So idea is to utilize the AutoComplete component for search and provide the suggested terms from the search engine as part of the SearchAPI response.

This makes sense to me. One thing that I'm not 100% sure about is if this has to be returned on the same response from the query endpoint, or if we want to introduce another endpoint responsible for only getting search suggestors. Have you been thinking about that anything when writing up the feature request?

Some (but not limited to) work that I see needs to happen as part of this is:

1. Implement support for search suggestors on the search engine modules that supports this:
   • lunr (not a separate module but including here anyways)
   • search-backend-module-elasticsearch
   • search-backend-module-pg
2. Support returning search suggestors from search backend
   a) by extending the query endpoint (and the resultset interface)
   b) introducing a new endpoint only responsible for returning the suggested terms
3. depending on which path to take in 2, potentially extend the SearchApi interface with another method that can be implemented for getting search suggestions
4. Potentially update the SearchAutocomplete component that already exist to get options from the search api instead of passing through as prop

Is this aligned with your thinking? Have I missed anything thats on top of your mind? We might want to discuss 2 and 3 before starting with 1, so that we are aligned on the approach and then we could split 1 into different engine specific issues to separate the work as long as the approach is settled on. From our side, this is not something that is on our near term roadmap, but if its something you want to come up with a proposal for I'm happy to support with feedback.

[drodil]

Sounds good. Maybe it requires a new endpoint for suggestions, I haven't really thought it through.

Splitting this into multiple issues makes a lot of sense as they can be worked on independently.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[drodil]

Not stale

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[drodil]

Still not stale 😄