Popular Query Suggestions

Profiles: Project Creator, Search User

Squirro can suggest queries to the user that have been used in a previous search.

While typing in a query, the matching query suggestions are suggested to the user as autocompletion with the suggested queries ranked on popularity and relevance.

The more often a query was used, the higher the popularity score.

Search users will see this by default when they begin typing a query in the search bar. Project creators can tune the settings for the popular query suggestions.

Note

You must set up Activity Tracking to use the Popular Query Suggestions feature.

Example

In the example shown below, the top two suggestions are popular queries. The next suggestions in the list are content-based key phrase suggestions, followed by the suggestions for communities.

Popular Query Setup

The diagram below depicts the conceptual data flow when a user enters a query:

1. Frontend Service/activity: Tracks users’ dashboard interactions, search queries, and their results.

2. Elastic Activity Logs Index: The Log Shipper indexes log files from the file system into Elastic (Squirro project index) using the Squirro Activity Log data source (see Activity Tracking).

3. Update Manager:

   1. Aggregates unique queries from the Activity Logs Index (2)

   2. Maintains the customised Popular Queries Index that stores:

      query, context, trendiness.popularity

4. Topic Service/typeahead: Returns typeahead suggestions from the Popular Query Index

Settings

Server Configuration

Configure the following server-wide settings in the Server space under Configuration:

Name	Value	Description
topic.typeahead.popular.enabled	true false Default: true	Enable or disable the popular query feature. Requires that all activity tracking is correctly setup and configured, the facets are correctly mapped and the data is available in the monitoring project.
topic.typeahead.popular.popular-query-idx	squirro_popular_queries-v1 (setting not meant to be changed; exists to be ready for future change)	Elesticsearch index that contains all unique queries, sorted by popularity and project. This is the input data for the Typeahead Suggester (see figure above).
topic.typeahead.popular.schedule-frequency	30	Interval in seconds to run popular-query aggregation update task.

Project Configuration

You can control the scope of the popular query suggestion with the following setting in the Project Configuration under the SETTINGS tab of a project.

Name	Value	Description
topic.typeahead.popular.scope	project user Default: project	Scope on which popular queries are analysed. user: each user only sees their own popular queries. project: popular queries are aggregated per project and thus the number of users running the same search will make the query more popular overall.