Joho the Blog
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"As you type, the Google Suggests beta suggests completions based on how many hits there are for each possible fulfillment."

Not so, at least, not according to my testing.

Type in 'Stephen' *yeah, I'm an ego tester, what of it? ;) *

It gives you Stephen King and Stephen Hawking as the top two results. That's the top two finishers in a Google serach on 'Stephen' as well.

But Stephen Hawking shows 340K results - less than several other Stephens below him. And less than 'Stephen Downes' which, at 350K, doesn't even show up on the list (despite being the third 'Stephen' in a Google search on that name).

It looks to me like - for names at least - Google drew and ordered from some sort of Celebrity Search site.

The Javascript was too opaque for me to try to decipher, but based on a few fragments as well as common sense - I'm guessing there is a conversation between the browser and Google going on in realtime, while I type.

This could be a Knownow/mod_pubsub type Javascript proxy server. It's pretty awesome that Google has done this.

If this interface becomes the default, it will be interesting to see what happens to performance. Now, presumably while the load is relatively light and over my 3 Mbs broadband link, it's quite snappy; if performance were significantly worse, the utility (such as it is) would decline to near zero.

>It looks to me like - for names at least - Google drew and ordered from some sort of Celebrity Search site.

I think they are primarily based on search volume. at least thats how Google makes it sound here:
http://labs.google.com/suggest/faq.html#q2
"Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. An example of this type of popularity information can be found in the Google Zeitgeist. Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on your personal search history."

>If this interface becomes the default, it will be interesting to see what happens to performance.

It will change lots of search habbits (making search a bit more closed off) and cause massive change to their keyword auction based business model by causing additional bidding wars and lots and lots of fraud.

They already have a firefox extension for this. Really cool. It has some bugs but not bad for a night of hacking.

Get it here: http://www.loconet.ca/

Merry Holidays from ze google alpha-bet meme.
http://www.google-alphabet.com

Hi guys,

I just finished implementing Google suggest for a dictionary database.

http://www.objectgraph.com/dictionary

The code is clean and you could see it by using "View Source". Also there is a section "how does it work?" to see the actual code and database.

The dictionary database is on an SQL server (total of 18000+ words) with an index on the word column.

I'm not sure why all the hype about doing javascript postbacks. We have done this in our web ap. Not exactaly the same (each key down), but using JS to validate data input onBlur and also perhaps get stuff for example to fill in an account discription when the account number was typed in.

We have had some critisim from some team members.

1. It uses an ActiveX control and people disable this. (Not sure that it applies to our intranet ap though.)
2. It only works on Windows machines since it uses Microsoft.MSXML control. Although somewhere I think I read GS works on Safari and when looking at Googles javescript they are using the same object. Is it available on a non-Windows machine?
3. If you want a UI this rich you should create a win forms app.
Althought I did learn that you can use the autocomplete=off attribute, didn't know about that one.

I noticed that google suggest does not show same number of results as google.com itself:
http://www.nirendra.net/cms/google/suggest

-Nirendra

I need Java Script to enter several websites. Where can I find it so I can download it? Dlo I need to buy a disc????

Thanks for the google suggest beta. See you guys.