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Search is all about anticipation and adaptation. Context awareness has become a key aspect of the brand experience and one of the main differentiators. However, we tend to think of personalization as the only way to adapt search to our users, to make them feel understood and special. But there are many other dimensions, equally important, where we can add a bit of this ingredient. One of them is the experience itself. On today's article, we are going to talk about one of the mechanisms to adapt your search journey to the user intention: Instant Search.

What is Instant Search?

Instant Search, also known as search-as-you-type or typeahead, is a feature where search results pop out as the user types. As opposed to Delimited Search, it provides immediate feedback to the user, without the need of actively submitting a complete search query.

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Instant Search vs Delimited Search

What are the benefits of Instant Search?

Imagine the following scenario: one of your customers decides to use the search feature, so she clicks on the search box and starts typing. At this point, most commerces choose to provide an autocomplete feature with search suggestions and perhaps a few categories. And that's awesome: they are assisting, guiding and inspiring the journey. Instant Search is about taking this concept to the highest degree and adapting all the elements in the interface to the current context (i.e. a user that wants to search). This includes transforming categories into filters, promoted products into search results and unnecessary elements into history. Now a committed search user is not only rewarded with relevant results, but also with relevant elements in the UI.

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