In the last few months I witness an impressive advancement in the auto-complete function of browsers, web sites and application. So I decided to summarize the evolution of it, in terms of User Experience.

In the beginning there was (and still) Internet explorer

In Internet explorer 7, the auto-complete only complete if the browsing history string starts with the exact string the user wrote. for example, if you write the string "A", only web sites that start with "A" will appear.

And Google said, let there be Google Suggest

Google suggest, is literally suggesting the users search terms according to the the strings the users entered into the search box. and in the same principal of the Internet explorer, it mostly suggest the matches from the beginning of the search terms.

There is only one small user experience problem as I see it, sometimes the string I enter will be more relevant in the middle of the sentence, but due to the fact that Google has so many suggestion to give that match the beginning of the phrase, you almost never see suggestion that include your string in the middle of the suggested search term. (I had to write "hesaurus" to receive the suggestion that doesn't start with "H" and got "Thesaurus"...). I wonder if the Google algorithm take it into consideration.

And Mozilla saw the light, and created FireFox 3

The big improvement in FF, is that the auto complete searches the string you enter in the address box, not just in the beginning of the phrase but in the middle of it and/or in the site description, all according to how relevant it is according to the user browsing history.

Today a short and easy domain name is not something so common, and many domains today are created from half words or a couple of words, and this is not so easy remember. The FF auto complete was a huge improvement in terms of user experience, as users no longer need to be so accurate, and remember exactly the domain name, they only needed to remember part of it or how it is described.

And Google said, let there be Google Chrome

In Google Chrome the address box and the search box are combined to one. If the phrase you enter exists in your browsing history it will suggest a web site, if it doesn't it will suggest that you will search for this phrase.

So simple and so smart, why hassle the user to click between two boxes that are so relevant to each other, when he can do it in one.

And when something makes your life so much easier, people find out many ways use it.

Good friends of mine, created the startup Predictad, They give advertisers a new place to advertise in - in the suggest box. The ads that appear. are relevant to the user search phrase. This gives the publishers and the advertisers a new way to earn money or exposure.

I wrote this post because I saw today a nice post in the weblog of 37signals - Signal vs. Noise, a nice enhancement Highrise made to their auto complete tool.

Something in particular caught my eye, Their auto complete tool, also know how to complete strings that not exactly match (For example if the user wrote "danrimon" (my name), the auto complete will also know to search for "dan rimon"). This is pretty cool, although exists in other places, including Google Chrome, but for some reason I only noticed it when i saw Highrise video.

This made me think, What's next?

The purpose of the auto complete is to help users, then why not take it to the next level:

• One obvious improvement - correct spelling mistakes.
• The other thing is more interesting in user experience terms, and this is Auto-Complete with filtering. what do I mean? If I want to search the word "Water" for example, I can write instead "trewa" (Why is that?), because this string includes all the letters of the word "water", but mixed. What the auto complete algorithm should do in my mind is suggest all the strings that include these latter in the relevant possible combination (and filter the words that do not include these letters or part of them). This simple change will solve a lot of most common mistakes we do when we write in the Internet. mix the letters because we write to fast and do not pay attention very closely.

If you have any more interesting auto complete tools or just more insights - feel free to share.