alt Hacker NewsThis autocomplete suggests domains that don't exist. You can just type garbage and it will suggest something, but then if you go there, there are no records.
It seems like one purpose of an autocomplete box is help you avoid typos, so that makes it less useful.
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The autocomplete seemed to suggest real domains to me. If you typed in garbage it suggested the garbage plus a bunch of common TLDs - that seems like a reasonable choice to me. In any case, if your issue is the list of domains to suggest, its trivial to change that to a different list.
Yes, OP seems to have completely lost touch with what is actually useful vs optimizing metrics for the sake of it.
This behavior seems to happen only when there is no more words in the list that can complete the current string. Otherwise, it shows only existing domains.
I guess this behavior helps to autocomplete the domain extension for less-known domains that are not in the search list.
That's also the old behaviour of browsers and the current one of text browsers. I fail to see how this is wrong.
$ lynx doesnotexist2
Looking up doesnotexist2 first
Looking up www.doesnotexist2.com, guessing...
Looking up www.doesnotexist2.edu, guessing...
Looking up www.doesnotexist2.net, guessing...
Looking up www.doesnotexist2.org, guessing...
Can't Access `file://localhost/home/user/doesnotexist2'
Author here.
Yes, it will autocomplete the most popular domains first, then known registered domains, and then fall back to appending popular TLDs.
The reason is that it's impossible to enumerate all domains. gTLDs (like .com, .info) mostly publish their zone files, but ccTLDs (like .cn, .de) usually don't.
But maybe you're right. After reading these comments, it's clearly confusing to people.