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I also worked on a production auto complete feature for a web app a bit ago and I couldn't agree more with the quality sentiment. One or two characters is almost never enough to give a meaningful result. Using history or similar user search is much more effective than trying to guess what someone meant by "th".

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> One or two characters is almost never enough to give a meaningful result.

TFA acknowledges that and mentions the exception:

While a prefix of length=1 is not very useful for the Latin alphabet, it does make sense for CJK languages

How does that fare for non-English queries? E.g. are two chars still not enough for Chinese languages?

I've seen 1.5 chars/token used as a rule of thumb for estimating token counts in Chinese text.

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