do yall like the current ui ouch browser has for autocomplete? im thinking of improving it
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@maxine this is super cool??????
@maxine how would you improve it
@hipsterelectron probably mostly backend changes, im planning on implemented ranked autocomplete for bangs and aligning search autocomplete with what youd see in every other browser (suggestions for tabs, history, actual support for autocompleted domains etc)
@maxine what kind of ranking are you thinking
@hipsterelectron like the usual weighted ranking, maybe !wi could have wikipedia at the top, but the ones that start with wi follows. if u select like wiby for example it would move that up in ranking the more u select it
@hipsterelectron what its using right now is just a very bare StartsWith and Contains and a list
@maxine i messed around with my phone keyboard heuristics a few years back but even then like on top of just text based querying it's interesting how you've got this two-layered semi-structured text input here with the bangs
@hipsterelectron is it true that autocomplete on phone keyboards are powered by markov chains?
@maxine usually something like edit distance is used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_distance because (esp for modern computers and phones) the number of possible words (1) is relatively small (2) can be further narrowed down with a prefilter operation before performing the more expensive distance calculation (and the thing is you can actually choose your own distance heuristic)
@maxine there are some canonical dynamic programming algorithms (which i hate) for one-shot edit distance but as i'm sure you have found already it's often useful to retain search work previously performed as the user narrows down a query (i do not recall if my code does this i can look it up)
@maxine so people sometimes do use per-letter markov chains for this but i actually hate that bc it takes a heuristic the user can understand and modify and replaces it with opaque statistics that they can't and i'm basically 100000% hardcore against that shit bc i feel that text search is almost the perfect example of an expert tooling system and experts need systems they can understand
@maxine it creates a statistical metric and corpo types love that along with scientists it gives them a number to optimize but i don't feel that that number from a markov approach represents what a user wants. i suppose i could make it a switch though and allow users to select either hmmmmm
