How to implement autocomplete on a massive dataset

Question

I\'m trying to implement something like Google suggest on a website I am building and am curious how to go about doing in on a very large dataset. Sure if you\'ve got 1000 items

Answer 1

You keep the items on the server side (perhaps in a DB, if the dataset is really large and complex) and you send AJAX calls from the client's browser that return the results using json/xml. You can do this in response to the user typing, or with a timer.