Revisiting AJAX Incremental Search

How Structured Data Matching Engines Enable a Revolutionary Incremental Search Interface

AJAX Incremental Search Revisited: find out how to develop
and design the ultimate incremental search application.

You may have seen AJAX incremental search on the Web, under names such as typeahead search, or autosuggest, or autocomplete, or even “search as you type.” It has also been called instant search, and chances are that you’ve seen it under a Google search box as “Google Suggests.”

When a searcher begins to type a query, the search system immediately begins processing the search request and returning results. This AJAX incremental search starts as the first few characters of the query are typed. Search query suggestions or search results are instantly displayed to the searcher based on his or her partially typed query milliseconds after each stroke on the keyboard

Interface design expert Jef Raskin has stated that, “In spite of near agreement about the desirability of incremental searches most interface-building tools make it difficult or impossible to implement incremental searches.”

In response to those difficulties, Exorbyte has made groundbreaking improvements on the traditional technology that underlies AJAX incremental search, after recognizing that its advanced structured data search engine MatchMaker was capable of better supporting such dynamic web applications than most databases or search engines could.

Using a MatchMaker foundation, Exorbyte’s SearchNavigator can quickly suggest near matches using its approximate matching technology. This AJAX incremental search interface becomes more than just a way to “search” for content; it also enables “direct navigation” to target content.

Such an interface improves the traditional search experience with query rewriting through dynamic suggestions. It also allows advanced search results to be displayed (misspellings, semantic search suggestions, faceted search, taxonomies, etc.) before a query is typed out completely.

Searchers can click on suggested results and navigate straight to the pages they want to see, bypassing traditionally cumbersome and search steps that often lead searchers to dissatisfaction and lead businesses to lost transactions and lost revenues.

Read AJAX Incremental Search Revisited to find out how we developed our advanced AJAX incremental search, and how it can benefit you.

Table of Contents

About the Authors

The Exorbyte Inc. team has accumulated an impressive amount of experience with structured data search, search interfaces, and search engine technology.  The author of this particular paper, Daniel Nicollet, is a 15 year veteran of the search software industry (Netcenter, Infoseek, and RealNames).  He has synthesized the incremental search knowledge accumulated by Exorbyte’s developers, interface designers, and business-focused project managers.

About Exorbyte

Exorbyte publishes high-performance search software for all databases and structured data formats.  Exorbyte software offers a large array of phonetic and algorithmic fuzzy search methods while returning results under 10 ms across many millions of records. Exorbyte GmbH was founded in 2000 is headquartered in Konstanz, Germany.  Exorbyte Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary located in Portland, Oregon.  Exorbyte also has offices in the UK.