Posted on 03/20/2012 at 09:11 AM
| Filed Under Blogs
Awesome, glad to hear you're digging the improvements! If you do happen to run into any issues with it, please let me know. I'm sure there's some sort of flaw in there!
This one of those things that got backburnered for so long that I just kind of pretended it wasn't an issue. Then as I was spec-ing out a private message system, I needed some way for users to be able to select who they want to message without going to a user profile; auto-complete seemed like the best solution. After that I went and sought out a nice auto-complete jQuery module and sure enough, it was built into the framework already.
From there, I tried it out on some of our internal tools, found that it worked well and resurrected my old search project to much greater success than I had imagined.
The old search was just, like you said, crappy. It was very picky (and the current one kind of is too, it's just less noticeable) making it very hard to find what you're looking for. The instant feedback and new prioritization of results makes it much simpler to find exactly what you need.