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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T03:33:06+00:00

To preface, I’m working with Google App Engine which does not allow JOINS or

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To preface, I’m working with Google App Engine which does not allow JOINS or Full Text Search.

Problem: I’m trying to build an autocompletion search bar (like Google Instant Search). For the purpose of explaining, assume that each entry in the database is a big string with no spaces. If I type in “cr”, I get an autocompletion assist with all the strings that begin with “cr”. I figured out a way to achieve this search in Google App Engine but it seems like a horrible idea to POST a query to the server everytime a key is pressed in the input search bar.

I’m thinking that a combination of client side and server side caching could help do this efficiently? Anybody have any ideas? Or just tips on best practices? Thanks.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Maybe you could do something like “request a max of 50 options” every time a key is pressed or every 1 second, whichever is less frequent. I think a series of post requests would be a good solution.

    On the server, you should expect multiple related queries, so even though you’re only sending 50 at a time to the client, you could cache 1000 results and benefit if the next query takes you to a subset of those results.

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