Unreachable typeahead results

[joshuagraber]

Context

• When we first built the typeahead stuff, we made the decision to limit the response to ten items.
• The problem with this is that some locations are unreachable. (Try searching for "Cleveland", for instance, and notice you are not presented with "Cleveland, OH," which would likely be the most frequently searched cleveland.)
• related to Searches with 0 results: suggestions and next search #287
• related typeahead enhancement for common names #389

Requirements

I can see a few options here:

1. Just return everything, and the client can handle making the content scrollable.
2. Implement more dynamic searching, so that a user's search terms are split at ' ', then applied to city, state, and county (i.e., if a user searches "Cleveland, " or "Cleveland, Ohio" we currently show no results found. If we could strip punctuation and split that string to be `["Cleveland", "Ohio"] and apply all words as search terms dynamically (both individual words and the whole phrase, to catch place names with spaces), users could just keep typing and narrow the list)
3. Sort search results by population or number of data sources (although with this option we would wind up hiding smaller places or those that aren't represented in our data. Better, but still not great.)

Tests

• This is just discussion for now, but any updates should be covered in tests.

Docs

• As above.

Open questions

Everything is currently open for discussion.

[joshuagraber]

Hey @josh-chamberlain @maxachis Here's that issue I referenced yesterday to discuss typeahead stuff! Added some overview in the description to get us started.

[josh-chamberlain]

@joshuagraber I think a combination of all 3 options for requirements would be good. return more, parse inputs better, and maybe sort by population (it's hard to say if this will be confusing or not until we try it, IMO). We could fall back to splitting on commas if the magic way doesn't work.

[maxachis]

@josh-chamberlain @joshuagraber I'll get to work on this! The one caveat is that certain options might slow down the typeahead -- by how much, I don't know, but it's something to be aware of. Will have a better answer for this once I start working on it.