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Comment by jisaacstone | Hacker News Reader

Yes this is missing the oft-overlooked option of synonyms.

There is no reason why the auto-complete cannot have something like this:

     <option value="DE">DE</option>
     <option value="DE">Germany</option>
     <option value="DE">Deutschland</option>

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A reason for not doing that is that it looks ugly to show multiple options for the same country.

Another is that that can be confusing. Suppose I want to enter a country whose spelling/native name I am not sure of, and after a few characters, four options remain, three of which are correct, but I do not know that. That can cause a needless google to find out, say, the difference between Liberia, Libya, and Libië.

In this instance it wouldn't look ugly as they are just three different results that could show up in the search.

It would be confusing to the user to give three separate options for the same country and expect them to know they are the same. What it should do is if you type "deuts", it should return

    Germany (Deutschland)

or if you're on a German site and type "germa", it should return

    Deutschland (Germany)

The default/preferred language should be the same as the language of the website, and it should tell the user why it's returning a value that's different than what they're typing.

This has alternate spellings (data-alternative-spellings). So you can type America and it will show United States.

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