Real time Prefix matching and auto-complete in Quora

Question

How is real time autocomplete with prefix matching implemented in Quora ?

Since Solr and Sphinx doesn't support real-time updating so what changes were made to support real time updating?

Answer 1

Looks like it's done using javascript and jquery. I grabbed a few key lines from the minified script on the Quora homepage that I think support this theory:

Here's an ajax call to a resource providing JSON data:

$.ajax({type:"GET",url:this.resultsQueryPath,dataType:"json",data:a,success:this.fnbind(ƒ(a){this.ajaxCallback(a)}),error:this.fnbind(ƒ(a,b,c){console.log(b,c),this.requestOutstanding=!1,this.$("#@results_shell").html("Could not retrieve results: "+b)})})}

note that the successful result gets put into the "a" variable. Then later here's the autocompletion based on the keydown of the "question_box" element which is completing from the parent of "a"

this.$ ("#@item input.question_box").keydown (ƒ (b) {
if (b.keyCode==9&&!b.shiftKey)for (var c=e.getLiveDomId (a.cid),d=a.parent ().orderedVisibleChildren (),f\^M=0;f<d.length-1;++f)if (c==d [f]) {
$ (this).blur (),$ ("#"+d [f+1]+" input.question_box").focus ();return!1}
})

I think this is pretty incontrovertible, but it would still be nice to have the un-minified script to compare. For instance I can't see where resultsQueryPath comes from (I can't locate it's source, may be intentionally obfuscated).