>It was designed this way in a (as far as I can tell,
misguided) attempt to provide better speed for search
results for the 90% of cases where word-start is what
you're after.
Despite popular belief, the choice was mostly done to reduce matches so that
what you want to see is more likely to appear on the first screen. Searches for
'st' will list 'Steve' but not list all words with 'st' in them. Folks can
argue whether this is a good choice, but at least the debate moves to the real
issue.
Designing the search to look for a space is a poor choice, since spaces occur
more than any letter.
>Finally, there's a great search algorithm that
actually eliminates the normal requirement that
each character in the search space get compared
against something -- I'd love to see Palm use
this in order to speed things up.
Hmmm. If someone wants to write an algorithm like Boyer-Moore that can be shown
to be faster than ours, I'd like to replace ours with it. Note that many users
write maybe two to four letters, so Boyer-Moore doesn't neccessarily gain a lot
of speed. The email that restarted this topic was searching for "068", "89",
and "50". Those are pretty short!
-Roger Flores
