Simon Willison’s Weblog

Fast Autocomplete Search for Your Website (via) I wrote a tutorial for the 24 ways advent calendar on building fast autocomplete search for a website on top of Datasette and SQLite. I built the demo against 24 ways itself—I used wget to recursively fetch all 330 articles as HTML, then wrote code in a Jupyter notebook to extract the raw data from them (with BeautifulSoup) and load them into SQLite using my sqlite-utils Python library. I deployed the resulting database using Datasette, then wrote some vanilla JavaScript to implement autocomplete using fast SQL queries against the Datasette JSON API.

# 19th December 2018, 12:26 am / 24-ways, autocomplete, beautifulsoup, search, sqlite, jupyter, datasette

Typesense (via) A new (to me) open source search engine, with a focus on being “typo-tolerant” and offering great, fast autocomplete—incredibly important now that most searches take place using a mobile phone keyboard. Similar to Elasticsearch or Solr in that it runs as an HTTP server that you serve JSON via POST and GET—and it offers read-only replicas for scaling and high availability. And since it’s 2018, if you have Docker running (I use Docker for Mac) you can start up a test instance with a one-line shell command.

# 6th April 2018, 5:07 pm / autocomplete, open-source, search

Jeremiah Grossman: I know who your name, where you work, and live. Appalling unfixed vulnerability in Safari 4 and 5 —if you have the “AutoFill web forms using info from my Address Book card” feature enabled (it’s on by default) malicious JavaScript on any site can steal your name, company, state and e-mail address—and would be able to get your phone number too if there wasn’t a bug involving strings that start with a number. The temporary fix is to disable that preference.

# 22nd July 2010, 8:44 am / apple, autocomplete, browsers, exploit, safari, security, vulnerability, recovered

Building Fast Client-side Searches. Flickr now lazily loads your entire contact list in to memory for auto-completion. Extensive benchmarking found that a control character delimited string was the fastest option for shipping thousands of contacts around as quickly as possible.

# 19th March 2009, 3:35 pm / ajax, autocomplete, flickr, javascript, json

freebase-suggest (via) A jQuery plugin that performs auto-completion against the Freebase JSONP API, and allows the results to be limited to specific categories or subsets.

# 24th September 2008, 11:58 pm / autocomplete, freebase, freebasesuggest, javascript, jquery, jsonp, metadata