I love Quora as a product. This is a Q&A site where each question or answer is created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. Quora has a live search box in its top navigation bar. This box is it's single point of interaction with user input: for searching a question, for asking a question etc. You start getting suggestions as soon as you start typing in this box.

I was looking into Quora's live search feature and found something unusual. I noticed that as soon as I put my cursor in the search box on top navigation bar, browser starts sending search ajax calls to quora servers. It also sends ajax calls too frequently for a live search feature. 


(Quora search calls)


After noticing above stuff from Quora, I decided to compare Quora and StackOverflow live search feature. Results are given below. For the same text in a question (assuming same typing speed), Stackoverflow sent 6 calls to their servers while Quora sent 29 ajax calls to their servers.


(stackoverflow search calls)



(Quora search calls)

On studying further, I found that stackoverflow waits for a minimum number of characters before showing any result but that's not true in case of quora. Quora sent ajax calls as soon as I put my cursor in search box. This means that Quora send an ajax call for blank search box also.


(an ajax call for blank search box)
My concerns are:
  1. Can Quora better their frequency of ajax calls for search?
  2. Why should user pay for unnecessary bandwidth in this case (even if it is few bytes)?
  3. What is the use of search with insignificant number of characters in search box? Does it gives any relevant results in that case. For example: try typing "what" in search box.

Had Quora search results been personal, this feature might be much more benefitial but I don't think that we need this much speed for sending ajax calls.

 PS: I have posted a same question on Quora and am waiting for response on that.

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