Google Suggest
Google has a beta feature that offers suggestions as you type: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1. Works the same way as typing a name into the To box when composing an email in GMail. What is good about it is that it does it so quickly (considering the amount of data they hold) and lists how many matches to each suggestion.
The good thing with Google is that new features they add are browser friendly (i.e. work in Firefox, Safari, Mozilla and Opera - so don't just test against Internet Explorer). It looks like they probably use web services extensively via JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest (Mozilla/Firefox/Opera/Safari) or Microsoft.XMLHTTP/Msxml2.XMLHTTP (Internet Explorer).
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