United States of Autocomplete | Hacker News Reader

United States of Autocomplete

neatorama.com

8 pointszoowar5 comments

The original source of the image (http://www.verysmallarray.com/?p=1056) was submitted 12 hours ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1971974).

This is one thing about HN that has annoyed me. If a submission doesn't get voted up quickly, it will never get on the front page. After that, there's a big incentive to submit links that mirror the original content.

Instead of counting the number of votes since submission, it might be better to count the number of votes in the past hour or so. That would make a link submitted long ago jump up in ranking if it was resubmitted or upvoted recently.

So it's interesting that this only works because state names are being used as adjectives in the auto-completed phrases, and in English the adjective comes before the noun. That got me thinking about how auto-complete must function differently for languages where the word order is reversed. Can any HNers who routinely search in such languages give insight into how the differences affect usability?

For what is worth: in Portuguese the adjective comes after the noun so the autocomplete map thingie wouldn't work so well. But I don't think syntax is relevant to the way most people use search in general and autocomplete in particular. At least from what I can glean from autocomplete suggestions people use mostly keywords, not sentences enclosed by "". So if you type Rio de Janeiro the first autocomplete suggestion is em guerra ("in war", sadly) but none of the other suggestions are well-formed Portuguese phrases, e.g., rio de janeiro turismo isn't a phrase. I might have misunderstood your question, though.

> I don't think syntax is relevant to the way most people use search in general and autocomplete in particular.

I thought about this, but I wondered if it was true for most people/phrases. One is more likely to type "smart phone reviews" than "reviews phone smart". So, at the very least, autocomplete is going to be working in one direction a lot more often than the other.

Could we link to a larger version of the image please?

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