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I just want to point out, re: all these "instant" things, Google instant is useful not because its instant, but because its finishing queries for you.

Partial queries are not useful.

My 2cents

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I agree with you. I didn't build App Store Instant as a replica of Google Instant. With the APIs available, there isn't a reliable way to predict apps.

I built it because iTunes is slow. Try searching iTunes and clicking on an App (to read the description). It takes me 5+ seconds. This takes ~1 second.

Are you logging your queries? If you have enough searches you could build your own predictions. You're also proxying results, so you could use those to build an index too.

I am logging queries. Do you have any tips/suggestions as to how to do my own predictions?

For each prefix, which app are people eventually satisified with?

E.g. if "in" often leads to instapaper, predict that, while if "ins" often eventually leads to "instantapp", that's the prediction for that prefix.

Yea not this specifically, just in general.

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