A few weeks ago, I noticed that the Yahoo Finance website uses an auto-fill tool when searching for stock quotes. When you enter a “B” into the “Get Quotes” search bar, Yahoo automatically presents the following options to choose from:
- B Barnes Group Inc. NYSE
- BIDU Baidu.com, Inc. NASDAQ
- BAC Bank of America Corporation NYSE
- IBM International Business Machines Corp. NYSE
- BEAS BEA Systems Inc. NASDAQ
- BA Boeing Co. NYSE
- BRCM Broadcom Corp. NASDAQ
- BBY Best Buy Co. Inc. NYSE
- BX The Blackstone Group NYSE
- BP BP plc NYSE
I have no idea if any company is planning to do this, but what would happen if an Internet browser did the same thing for the browser bar? Imagine entering “CN” into your browser and automatically being given the choices of CNET.com, CNN.com or another popular websites that begin with the letters CN. I really have no idea if this type of thing is in the works, but it could spell trouble for typo domain names, and could be a boon for generic .com names.
Eventually the URL bar and the search bar will be merged. It’s just silly to have two large input textboxes up there, taking up that screen real estate. (I’ll dub it now the “unibrow” bar)
Maybe it’ll happen when someone creates a new browser: out Firefox Firefox including this new gimmick.
It’s already auto-completing with your local history. I wish mine would auto-complete based on my del.icio.us bookmarks… or whatever domain/set of sites I choose.