How to implement auto suggestion (auto complete) functionality in GAE

Question

I want to implement auto suggest functionality in Google App Engine (GAE/GWT).

The client side of the implementation works fine with GWT SuggestBox and RPC. My main issue is the server side of the implementation. I tried the Google search API but it seems that there is a limitation of 250MB of total indexed data and the search can be performed on complete words and not parts of each word!

How should I approach this? I read that lucene or solr is not supported in GAE. I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 12 '12 at 18:15

You can achieve a basic text search using these techniques described here: http://googlecode.blogspot.com.br/2010/05/google-app-engine-basic-text-search.html

In short:

Build a query using content >= yourQuery && content < yourQuery + "\ufffd", where the content property of your entity can be a String or a List of Strings.

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

3

I've taken this approach and it works fine for me:

Split up text into separate words. Get rid of duplicates, special characters and short words (in, of, and, etc..).
Add this list of words to entity as a list property.
Search via text range query: listProperty >= wordPart && listProperty < wordPart + "\ufffd"

edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

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answered Nov 12 '12 at 19:32

Peter Knego

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Does this solution costs a lot on GAE? – Efstathios Kalyvas Nov 13 '12 at 16:39
There is a cost with storing an indexed list of properties. The cost of query is the same as any other query. – Peter Knego Nov 13 '12 at 21:29

How to implement auto suggestion (auto complete) functionality in GAE

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