Announcing Soulmate, a Redis-backed service for fast autocompleting

Are you really using the technique described in the Redis auto-complete page? Doesn't that method take a lot more RAM than is necessary using a more specialized approach (i.e. a trie)?<p>Also, from what I can tell, every query is log(N) in the size of the completion set, instead of linear in the length of the query/suggestion (again, like a trie). Seems like this might have trouble scaling to large suggestion sets.

As a UX note, I've always quietly loved autocompletes that aren't just a flat list of terms, but actually contain structured information organized in an intuitive fashion. The design of the suggestions on SeatGeek is fantastic.

Would be cool to have an example of this running on websockets and get rid of the request/response latency that most autocompletes have. Keep the socket open when the text field is focused and you should be able to cut down the response time even further without that overhead.

The example autocomplete on Seatgeek.com is indeed impressively fast.<p>I might have to use this in my next service.

How many phrases of length 30 could you handle with 1GB of RAM?<p>Or do you have numbers on the mean length of a phrase you handle currently, the number of such phrases and how much memory it takes?

Awesome work guys! I really hope this type of UI becomes more widespread. On a side note, I've always thought the guys over at www.glyde.com execute it quite well.

Great stuff!<p>In curious: What do you think about exposing this service via WebSockets? Would that make it even faster?

Oh, oh yes. Thank you kindly. I was literally about to embark on this very feature. Let's take a closer look...

The UI on seatgeek is almost identical to what rdio provides, I wonder if rdio is using it.

My first few searches took a while, then every search was pretty fast. Is it the load?

How ironic, this is perfect for the dating site I'm working on :)

Nice work.