Is it possible for search to return suggestions as you type?

[kinetiksoft]

You may call me crazy, but I remember days when Discourse search returned results as you type. With some update, it was removed and now you must press “Enter” or click “search in all posts and topics…” value below.

Is it possible to make search to suggest the topics based on what user types? There is no need to search by each symbol typed. Suggest by word entered or after timeout should be a viable solution too.

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

Hi kinetik

The real-time search was removed in 2021. The resource usage versus benefit wasn’t good enough overall, hence the decision. It has been discussed a lot, though I can’t find the topic right now, but it’s not coming back.

The only way would be, I believe, to create a custom plugin.

I’ll add the related discussion later when I find it, if you want to know more about the context.

edit:

Revert search to old live search pattern

No, this isn’t new. We’ve had this for a while as a feature, if you are in a topic, a category, a tag or your PMs, you would previously see a checkbox to search in that specific context. What is new is that the checkbox has been replaced with a “keyword in this topic” row. This is a legitimate complaint. I worked on this change to search and I very much expected this to be raised as an issue. As @dodesz points out just above, you can hit Enter to search all topics. You can also use up/down ar…

Revert search to old live search pattern

We have observed that pointless search work was the bulk of search work our servers did. Our servers did mountains of search work, on some sites it was the 2nd or 3rd most expensive route when it comes to total cost. Our servers are very very fast, we can eat a lot of this pain. Self hosters on the other hand were paying a price that was way too high. This is not in our plans, sure we will tweak and improve the design, possibly make the hinting richer and so on. However we have no plans to sa…