Groundbreaking AJAX Incremental Search White Paper Released - A Data Matching Engine To The Rescue

Sept. 1, 2009 - PRLog -- Portland, OR - Exorbyte Inc. - The white paper is titled: AJAX Incremental Search Revisited - How Structured Data Matching Engines Enable a Revolutionary Incremental Search Interface.  


It can be read in its full version at http://www.exorbyte.com/index.php/Products/ajax-incremental-search-revisited.html



SearchNavigator, the incremental search software based on Exorbyte’s high performance structured data search platform MatchMaker, has become a leading ecommerce search solution in Germany over the past few years.  It powers some of the country’s largest ecommerce sites and has proven its worth with the interface designers, the content developers, and the product managers of web agencies, online content and ecommerce services.  

Incremental search is sometimes called “incremental find”, “typeahead search”, “autosuggest”, “autocomplete”, “combo box”, “search as you type”, “filter/find as you type” (FAYT), “inline search”, “instant search”, “word wheeling” or even “Google suggests”.  Incremental search is often opposed to “delimited search” in which a user is required to fully formulate a search query before the system starts processing the search request.  Incremental search starts right when the user types his first few query characters.  Search query suggestions or search results are instantly presented to the user based on his partially typed query milliseconds after each character stroke.  On web sites these results usually appear in a JavaScript layer which loads and updates itself asynchronously as the user keeps on typing.

Interface design expert Jef Raskin says that “in spite of near agreement about the desirability of incremental searches most interface-building tools make it difficult or impossible to implement incremental searches.”  Large bodies of content are mostly composed of text and data records of which users do not suspect the existence.  Only a very fast approximate search engine can display these suggested matches with the speed and relevance incremental search requires.  AJAX incremental search interfaces can give users a stunningly clear bird’s eye view into large and complex data sets.  

Today’s basic AJAX incremental search interfaces can never give users a real sense of what, in the searchable content, resembles what they are looking for.  Exorbyte has made some groundbreaking improvement on the traditional technology that underlies AJAX frameworks and AJAX applications when it realized that its advanced structured data search engine (MatchMaker) was capable of better supporting such dynamic web applications that most databases or search engines could.  MatchMaker is effectively capable of reliably serving faceted search suggestions to millions of users, from millions of searchable indexed records, using algorithmic, phonetic and any other advanced scripted match sequence.  

With its MatchMaker foundation, SearchNavigator is capable of suggesting near matches using its approximate matching technology.  MatchMaker’s speed also allows displaying of real search results from the content, not just search query suggestions.  The results can also be faceted, categorized, and described like on any advanced search results page.   The incremental search interface then becomes more than a way to “search” for content; it also enabled “direct navigation” to target content.  Such an interface improves the traditional search experience with query rewriting through dynamic suggestions.  It also allows the display of advanced search results ahead of query submissions.  Users can finally click on the suggested results and navigate straight to content, thereby bypassing entirely the traditionally cumbersome and costly search steps that often lead users to dissatisfaction and online business to lost transactions and lost revenue.  

Again, download the AJAX Incremental Search Revisited white paper at your convenience and find out how to develop and design the ultimate fast and usable incremental search application.

Exorbyte is a trademark of Exorbyte GmbH. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

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About Exorbyte
Exorbyte publishes high-performance search software for all databases and structured data formats. Exorbyte software offers a large array of phonetic and algorithmic fuzzy search methods while returning results under 10 ms across many millions of records. Exorbyte GmbH was founded in 2000 is headquartered in Konstanz, Germany. Exorbyte Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary located in Portland, Oregon. Exorbyte also has offices in the UK.