How does the IMDB search work so fast?

There is a search box in header navigation bar (http://www.imdb.com/) and when I type 2 (or 3) letters fast, for less than half a second, I can see 6 results coming out!!??

Does anyone have any idea how can one search a large amount of data and get the result with a picture. :)

Are the data read from RAM ?

If you don't know for IMDB, this question is about quick search with a large number of data in gene开发者_运维技巧ral (IMDB is just very fast search I found so far), if anyone has any experience with this, it would be of great help to tell me the best way to do such a thing.

Thanks in advance.

I do not know much about, but from my investigation, they do the calculations on a different server. further more, they are all precompile as "json" files.

if you go to: "http://sg.media-imdb.com/suggests/a/all.json" all the suggestions for the query "all" (the a in the /a/all is the first letter of the query, so for "hello" it would be /h/hello.json)

Im just guessing, but I'm suspicious the imdb apps (iPhone, iPad) use some kind of offline (local) search initially. I'm going to look into it...