What are the differences among instant search, article suggestion, and help center search?

Question

In the help center, there are three types of search:

Native Help Center search

Instant Help Center search

Article suggestion search

What are the differences between each search type?

Answer

There are several differences in how the help center search methods work.

Native Help Center search

With the native help center search, users enter keywords in the search bar and relevant articles appear on the search results landing page.

Does not use partial word search

Searches through titles, labels, and content

Instant search

With instant search, article titles that match the keywords appear under the search field as the user types.

Uses a partial word search

Only returns results based on article titles

If you want to turn off instant search for your help center, see Help center templating cookbook.

Article suggestion search

Article suggestions search provides search results when users fill out the subject field in the help center ticket form.

Searches through titles, labels, and content

Uses a relevance score to order suggested articles