Partial word search in Help Center API returns no results, while full word returns expected articles

Hi we’ve encountered a limitation in the Zendesk Help Center Search API (/api/v2/help_center/articles/search.json) that impacts our user experience and custom search implementation.

Currently, the API only supports full word search, which means a query like:

query=maquininha

correctly returns an article titled “How to use the maquininha”.

(Note: “maquininha” is a Portuguese term commonly used for card reader devices.)

But when using a partial word like:

query=maqui

the same article is not returned, even though maqui is a clear prefix of maquininha.

This behavior differs from the Help Center’s Instant Search, which does support partial word matching and would return relevant results for maqui.
 

Why this matters

Our users often type incomplete or partial terms, and we are building a custom frontend where we rely on the API to return meaningful results. The lack of prefix-based search in the API means we either:

• Miss potential matches and frustrate users, or
• Need to build a separate workaround using external indexing, which introduces complexity and sync issues.

Feature request

We’d love to see either of the following:

1. Support for partial word search in the existing Search API, similar to the Instant Search experience in the Help Center UI.
2. An official public API for Instant Search, exposing the same behavior programmatically.
3. A parameter or mode in the current API to toggle partial word or prefix matching.

Bonus: Tokenization clarification

We understand that stemming (e.g. cars → car) is supported, but prefix matching for unrelated stems (e.g. maqui → maquininha) does not seem to fall into that category. Some clarity or official guidance on how tokenization and matching work under the hood would also be valuable.

Thank you for considering this! This feature would greatly improve the quality of search-based integrations and frontend experiences.