What causes "No suggestions found" in jackwener/OpenCLI?

Try a more common or longer keyword — rare terms often have zero completions

jackwener/OpenCLI · warning · CliError

NOT_FOUND

NOT_FOUND

Error message

No suggestions found

What it means

The google suggest command throws this CliError with code NOT_FOUND when the endpoint responds 200 but the JSON payload has no suggestions array (data[1] missing or empty). It means Google returned a well-formed but empty completion response for the keyword.

Source

Thrown at clis/google/suggest.js:31

    browser: false,
    args: [
        { name: 'keyword', positional: true, required: true, help: 'Search query' },
        { name: 'lang', default: 'zh-CN', help: 'Language code' },
    ],
    columns: ['suggestion'],
    func: async (args) => {
        const keyword = encodeURIComponent(args.keyword);
        const lang = encodeURIComponent(args.lang);
        const url = `https://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?client=firefox&q=${keyword}&hl=${lang}`;
        const resp = await fetch(url);
        if (!resp.ok) {
            throw new CliError('FETCH_ERROR', `HTTP ${resp.status}`, 'Check your network connection');
        }
        const data = await resp.json();
        // Response format: ["query", ["suggestion1", "suggestion2", ...]]
        const suggestions = Array.isArray(data) && Array.isArray(data[1]) ? data[1] : [];
        if (!suggestions.length) {
            throw new CliError('NOT_FOUND', 'No suggestions found', 'Try a different keyword');
        }
        return suggestions.map(s => ({ suggestion: s }));
    },
});

View on GitHub (pinned to 49907e53dc)

Solutions

Try a more common or longer keyword — rare terms often have zero completions
Check the keyword isn't a term Google filters out of autocomplete (sensitive/filtered topics)
Log the raw response body to confirm the schema still matches [query, suggestions]
Treat empty suggestions as a normal empty result in calling code rather than a hard failure

Example fix

// before
if (!suggestions.length) throw new CliError('NOT_FOUND', 'No suggestions found', 'Try a different keyword');
// after
return suggestions.map(s => ({suggestion: s})); // caller handles empty array gracefully

Defensive patterns

Strategy: fallback

Validate before calling

// validate keyword before calling
if (!keyword || !keyword.trim()) throw new Error('keyword required');

Type guard

function hasSuggestions(data) {
  return Array.isArray(data) && Array.isArray(data[1]) && data[1].length > 0;
}

Try / catch

try {
  return await suggestCommand.func(args);
} catch (e) {
  if (e.code === 'NOT_FOUND') return []; // empty completions are a normal outcome
  throw e;
}

Prevention

Treat empty completions as valid empty results in batch keyword research
Avoid sensitive/filtered keywords known to be suppressed by Google autocomplete
Prefer longer, common phrases which reliably have completions
Log raw responses to detect schema changes early

When it happens

Trigger: fetch succeeds, resp.json() parses, but Array.isArray(data[1]) is false or data[1].length === 0 — e.g. a keyword with no autocomplete entries, a keyword filtered by Google (violence/adult terms), or an unexpected response schema.

Common situations: Querying very short, nonsense, or newly-coined terms that have no recorded completions; keywords suppressed by Google's autocomplete policy (sensitive terms); Google changing the response shape from [query, [sugs]] to something else; non-JSON body (e.g. HTML error page) causing data to be a string so data[1] is a character, not an array — though then it would likely throw in json parsing first.

Understand the failure class

Background: EmptyResultError / "no results found": when an API or scraper succeeds but returns zero rows — this error's family across 9 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of jackwener/OpenCLI@49907e53dc (2026-08-29). Data as JSON: /api/errors/2fd87b54c095ae8d. Report an issue: GitHub.