[yebyen]

I see this kind of behavior every day in gmail and it drives me batty. I'll use the 'l' shortcut to bring up the label drawer, start typing the name of my label, and three to four characters later gmail is actually ready for me to start typing.

Then I'll backspace out and re-type what I already typed, and Gmail highlights and decides I must want the third entry in the list for some reason, and makes it highlighted. So I'm moving over to the arrow keys.

The same kind of behavior in the search input as you're describing, too. Sometimes I get auto-suggest appearing after only one keystroke, sometimes it takes two. There seems to be no rhyme or reason, other than after a while I can usually somehow predict when my query will begin to be understood by the suggestion engine.

The inconsistency is really jarring, but just below the threshold where I start looking for another service because of how much it annoys me. Sort of like when my external monitor is physically positioned on the left side of my desk, but every time I plug it into the laptop it gets the virtual location off the right side of my screen.