Google Suggests.

The coolest web tool I’ve seen in a while. Google Suggests works by suggesting some search results WHILE YOU ARE TYPING search keywords (without refreshing the page).

Thanks go to Chris Justus from Server Side Guy for pointing out the service and its internals.

The google code uses an XMLHttp object to make calls back to google, and executing the results… to fully understand the code, I need to see what google is sending back… BUT when I tried the url directly, I didn’t get anything but a 404 back from google (it turns out I had mis-typed the generated url…)… I tried to have my browser go through a local proxy server, but it appears that the XMLHttp object doesn’t use the browsers proxy when communicating (which means that this might not work if you’re behind a proxy server… Can people confirm this??) … I would have fallen back on a packet sniffer to capture the data, but caught my mistake in the URL before reaching this point…

1) You can turn the browsers autocomplete off by adding autocomplete=”off” attribute to an input field… How did I not know this before…
2) The XMLHTTP / XMLHttpRequest object to communicate back with a server and get new info / instructions without refreshing the page … the new black of web development… go read everything you can about this…
3) How powerful the keypress handling can be with javascript… (capturing keyup/keydown and events and changing state for cursor key events, etc…)
4) You can highlight text in an input field using javascript…

I guess I will be spending some time with “XMLHttp”, definitely interesting.