Goal

Provide a web service that gives autocomplete suggestions for the search bar. As the user starts typing a search query we should provide useful suggestions.

Possible sources of auto complete data:

• Previous searches
• Topics from public databases like Wikipedia, Freebase
• Previously visited links

Can we do advanced things like:

• Suggestions based on user's current geo location
• Keywords or hashtags from the user's social feeds
• Trending topics on social networks?

Performance

This should answer questions like:

• Can we lookup suggestions real-time?

Quality

This should answer questions like:

• Can we present the user with results that are relevant?

Infrastructure

What would the server side part of this look like? Can we scale it up as the number of users and pages in Pancake grows? Can we maintain a large index? How would be distribute the index? Can we easily update an index?