[Sigia-l] the future of search

[Travis Wilson]

This sort of thing has been happening for decades in programming tools and 
Unix shells, where it's really damn useful -- cause you keep typing the 
same names of files, variables, subroutines, etc. And of course when there 
is only one result left that matches what you've typed, you can hit Tab or 
Enter or whatever to auto-complete the word.

It's only a matter of deciding to take the plunge and giving this 
functionality to users. I think they're ready for it. Something worth 
noticing, in case you haven't seen it: StarOffice's word processor offers 
this feature for long words in everyday document composition, as soon as it 
notices trends in your vocabulary.

trav

At 12:22 PM 7/26/2002 +0200, Andrew H Otwell wrote:
>Raskin described at length a "predictive" search interface (not his term,
>but close). This is the kind of thing you see in some Address Book
>interfaces: as I begin typing A...N...D... etc, a list of results is
>updating as I go, first listing all results beginning with A, then all
>results beginning with AN, then all results beginning with AND.
>
>While that won't work for an Internet-wide search interface, it would be
>nice to see more of it in confined spaces like the OS.