Autocompeter.com

About a year ago I found a great article about how to use Redis to index every prefix of every word as an index and thus a super fast way of building an autocomplete service. The idea is that you take all your titles and index them like this; if the title is "My Title" you store a key for m, my, t, ti, tit, titl and title. That means you can do very fast lookups as someone is typing unfinished words.

Anyway. I was running this merrily here on my personal blog but I liked it so much and I wanted to use it on aother site for work that I thought it'd be time to extract it into its own little microservice. All I needed was a name and my friend and colleague jezdez suggested I call it "autocompeter". So that it became.

The original implementation was written in Python and at the time I was learning Go and was eager to have something to build in Go. So I built this microservice in Go using the Negroni web framework.

The idea is that you own and run a website. You have a search feature on your website but you don't have a nifty autocomplete (aka. live search) thing on it. So, you send me all your titles, URLs and optionally their "popularity ranking" (basically a score). I'll index them on autocompeter.com under your domain. You have to sign in with GitHub to set up an API Auth Key.

Then, you put this into your HTML:

<script src="//cdn.jsdelivr.net/autocompeter/1/autocompeter.min.js"></script>
<script>
Autocompeter(document.querySelector('input[name="q"]');
</script>

Also, you'll need to download the CSS and put into your site. I don't recommend pointing to a CDN for CSS.

And that's all you have to do. The REST API, options for the Javascript integration and CSS integration in the documentation.

The Javascript is framework-free meaning it's just pure DOM manipulation and works in IE and modern browsers. The minified file is only 4.2Kb minified (2Kb gzipped).

All code is Open Source under a BSD license. Everything is free but there's no SLA as of yet.

I'm going to be blogging more and more about feature development, benchmarks and other curious things I learn developing this further.