Google Suggest

Google has introduced a revolutionary concept called Google Suggest, which is still in its beta form. The search box can display the possible, popular, context sensitive matches for the keywords which are being typed.

For example if we start typing a word starting with "C", it shows 10 possible and popular context sensitive words which could follow the letter that we have typed in. If we type another letter "O" as "CO", another set of possible combinations are being shown. These are shown along with the number of expected Search results. Tremendous way to reduce the amount of typing, eh!

The speed in which the data is loaded is quite amazing and shows how even a web application can be loaded with a response time nearly equal to that of a desktop client server application. If you experiment the HTML produced, it does not have any data associated with it.

Google is said to use a technology called AJAX, which is based on Javascript. Ajax is a short form for Asynchronous Java Script and XML. After disabling the auto complete for the browser for every letter typed, it gets the data back from the server from pre-populated list of keywords. Though the explanation is not for sure, this has been discussed as a possible methodology by a lot of web enthusiasts as being used by google.

Google Suggest can be access from the url http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en.