A9 skimmed...

A9 is Amazon's search engine, and if you haven't yet seen it, I suggest you check it out. In particular you should checking out some of their cool interface features - I’m interested in the drag and drop functionality and resizable tables in particular. I've glanced a few times at the code - it isn't obfuscated, although it isn't commented - so many people will be able to read through and understand how this works.

A couple of things of note:

• They keep changing the javascript... [When I first looked at the a9.com page, the JavaScript was right in the page, meaning every page update meant re-transmitting the full JavaScript]
  
• There is a single file for both IE and Mozilla. If you look around for drag and drop javascript information, and try the examples, you'll see that many of them work in only Netscape/Mozilla or IE, and very few work properly in both.
  
• They haven’t bothered to compress the JavaScript
  
• They are using gzip encoded content, meaning that the 70K JavaScript file is just a 15K download.
  

I won't be going through the A9 code line by line, but rather will be writing something from scratch - might take a month before I've got something worthwhile to post.

Many people have posted comments / suggestions and questions to by Google Suggest Dissected article, I've read everything, but have been too busy to respond to most of the comments - I'll try spend a night in the next 2 weeks answering some of these great questions in another blog entry.