Imitating google’s ‘Suggest’

Tuesday, December 28th, 2004

A lot of sites (PHP.net amongst others) are imitating google’s ‘Suggest’ feature (See this post). No doubt google will receive all the credit for this invention, even though plenty of other people already implemented similar features elsewhere. That, however, is not my gripe with this technology..

The problem is that this ‘feature’ FUBAR’s my browsers ability to autocomplete previously entered information. I hate that. Now when I enter something for the first time in some entrybox somewhere, it’ll help me by showing some possibilities.. but each time I return to retrieve the same information, I’ll have to find it all over again. Damn.

Oh, and by the way, I retract my oppinion about which example I like better. Google’s implementation is completely useless (the chances anybody who types ‘a’ into the searchbox would be wanting to search for ‘Amazon’ if fairly slim; seems more like a cheap commercial to me) while the Apple Developer example is a useful real-life example of how this could be used.

Update: PHP.net’s News page says the following about the implementation of the function-completing searchbox: “The function list suggestions we started to test a year ago seemed to be working better as some bugs were found and fixed, so it was time to make the result available on all php.net pages.“. So PHP isn’t really copying google after all. Doesn’t make the feature less annoying.