We're using Solr as a backend for an ECommerce site/system. The Solr index stores products with selected attributes, as well as a dedicated field for autocomplete suggestions (Done via AJAX request when typing in the search box without pressing return).
The autosuggest field is supplied by copyField directives from certain select product attribute fields (description and/or name mostly). It uses EdgeNGramFilterFactory to complete words not yet typed completely, and it works quite well. However, we come across an issue with a disconnect between the autosuggest results and results of a "normal search", that is, a query over the full fields of the product. Let's say there are products that are called "motor". - When autosuggesting, typing "mot" autosuggests all products with "motor", because the EdgeNGram created "m", "mo", "mot", "moto" and "motor", respectively, and it matches. - When searching for "mot", however (i.e. pressing enter when seeing the autosuggestions), it doesn't find any products. The autosuggest field is not part of the "real" search, and no product attribute contains "mot" as a word. One obvious solution would be to incorporate the "autosuggest" field into the "real" search, however, this adds many tokens to the index that aren't really part of the products indexed and makes for strange search results, for example when an NGram is also a word, but the record itself does contain the search term only as part of a word. Are there clever solutions to this problem?
