[spectre256]

It's important to note that this set of rules is for use with a small (<10000), known, possibly hand crafted set of results.

> Exact matches always come first.

One place this very first rule doesn't work is autocomplete for geocoding.

If you are typing "London":

- There is a village called Lon, Pakistan [1]

- There is also a village called Lond, Pakistan [2]

- There are numerous places called Londo all over the world [3]

So its necessary to determine that some places are more likely to be typed than others (population is a commonly available number that can help, but doesn't always work), or autocomplete becomes useless.

[1]https://spelunker.whosonfirst.org/id/1209616309/

[2]http://www.geonames.org/1370290/lond.html

[3]http://www.geonames.org/advanced-search.html?q=londo&country...

[hug]

I see no reason this doesn’t work for Lon and Lond and London.

It turns out that people in London, England have to type 2 more letters, a task that I am sure is not beyond them.

[afiori]

> It turns out that people in London, England

Together with all the other millions of people that write London around the world.

According to google trends London is searched about 20-30 times more often than Lon.

Sorting Lon before London (in absence of more information) seems a bad choice.

[lenocinor]

And I wonder how much the Lon search results are inflated by this same phenomenon? It may be a lot worse than 20-30 times.

[sethammons]

It is not beyond them, but tailoring experience for your user base to make their experience easier is almost always a good thing.