Google Suggest

Google Suggest

This is very cool. I read about it on a couple blogs, but until seeing it again on Joel on Software I'd been ignoring it...

In one of our products at work we have this feature called a Word Wheel. It's a search tool which provides feedback to the user when their are building a search. As they enter a search, actual words from the data are displayed and can be selected. This allows them to interactively see that they are searching for valid terms.

Google Suggest is very much the same. As you enter a search term, you not only get a list of matching terms but also how many times they've been found. This all happens as you type in your terms, narrowing the list as you continue to enter characters...

Pretty cool.

Also Joel talks about the tech behind this.

I've been doing out of band DHTML page updates with IE/XMLHTTP for a couple years now, but Google's is browser independent. Which is also pretty cool.