Will there be instant search (ajax) like on Quora? [still not answered]

Question

so that when a user is typing a search query for answers/questions or when a user is typing in his question, suggestions should instantly appear in the search box.

You can see it in action on Quora

This question is going as a top 5 HOT! question for last 6 days. i was hoping Gidgreen would answer this for the benefit of all users

Comments

ajax search lets users immediately see similar questions to the one they want to ask, which is highly important for q&a site. so maybe not the most important, but definitely one of the most important features

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How about using the tag suggestion for a token search and then modifying a jQuery Joomla pluggin to perform the real time search!

Answer 1

I fear instant search as on Quora is quite a hard thing to achieve :)

Maybe something useful/similar could be done by modifying e.g. something like this:

http://loopj.com/jquery-tokeninput/

...where instead of doing an autocomplete, it should retrieve and show the same questions that are currently shown when the user submits the single-line question in Q2A (when the corresponding setting is enabled) and the software asks if the question is different.

Comments

Why is it so hard to achieve ? Due to processing power needed or sth?

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Also this one seems fine for that:
http://www.searchblox.com/instant-search-jquery-plugin-for-searchblox

...or others suggested here:
http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-jQuery-plugins-for-auto-suggest-auto-complete-capabilities

...and here:
http://www.quora.com/What-is-a-good-jQuery-plugin-to-do-an-autosuggest-autocomplete-MySQL-search-that-can-search-in-multiple-fields-at-once

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I remember I read an answer on Quora by Adam D'Angelo (not sure) about that feature from a technical point of view. I'm not able to find it now to read it again - if someone succeeds please do post the link here.

Answer 2

For when typing in a question, this is already implemented, but the suggestions only appear when you hit TAB or click out of the box, since it uses "onchange".  If you want as-you-type suggestions, you can just change line 189 of qa-page-ask.php to:

        $qa_content['form']['fields']['title']['tags'].=' onkeyup="if(this.old_value == this.value || this.value.length < 4) return; this.old_value = this.value; qa_title_change(this.value);"';

Which will begin to show suggestions after you've typed four characters.

As for instant search, well, you can suggest it for 1.6 :)