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Google Suggest
Cristiano writes "As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's 'Did you mean?' feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time." It crashes Konqueror, but works nicely on Mozilla. Update: 12/11 by J : The engineer who thought of it, then built it in his "20% time," blogs about the process.
Not mine. Worked like a charm. Version 3.3.2 on Gentoo Linux 64bit
...Steve
Yes, it would be intensive for their server should everyone decide to use it in place of standrd Google search. However, the algorithm behind their "Did you mean" runs in O(n^2) worst case and O(n) best case. Not too shabby.. The algorithm is what makes it possible.
What is your penile percentile?
The source for the page is quite simple; most of the work happens in a condensed JavaScript library. Not easy reading (note the word "condensed" above, meaning function and variable names are 1 or 2 chars, and all extra whitespace was removed...), but it's actually pretty straightforward.
It disables your browser's autocomplete on that textfield (for obvious reasons). Then it basically just defines a hidden div for that auto-complete dropdown (variations on this depending on browser... frickin' incompatibilities).
Each time you type a character, it populates that div body with the results of a quick, tiny query back to Google. It's NOT running the search for you; it's hitting (I assume) a simple, probably totally in-memory list of the most popular searches and number of results. That's how it can be so quick a response -- the lookup on their end is super-minimal, and the data to be transferred is probably less than 1k each time.
Cool. Nice concept, nice execution. And one of those nice "only obvious in hindsight" additions.
Even cooler -- it looks like (from the js file) they are supporting multiple languages here, not just English. Anyone using want to test this out for me? I think even Chinese is supported (or maybe that's the one that isn't.. I don't want to take the time to parse this properly).