Lately, I've noticed that Facebook search presents it's autocomplete options as a nice categorized list:
However, I'm uncertain what to call this pattern. It reminds me a bit of what Peter Morville calls "Federated Search" (in his excellent book Search Patterns; here's a Slideshare overview of the content and here's his pattern library), whereby the search is run simultaneously across multiple databases, and the results are presented in discrete categories by source.
The (now defunct) Kosmix search result page is an example of this, with results being returned in separated categorized (non-intermingled) panes:
However, "federated search" has typically referred to the results page pattern, not something that exists in the auto-complete space. I've taken to calling this federated auto-complete, but I'm wondering if there's another common/"more official" name that exists?
Answer
This sounds like a composite of two patterns. It's not a hybrid, borrowing some aspects from autocomplete and some from federated search; it's nothing more or less than auto-complete and federated search used together. Therefore I think your calling out the existing patterns is preferable to using a unique name, even if someone has already coined one.
This is a little nit-picky, but it should be called federated auto-suggest, the difference being that auto-complete is for search terms and auto-suggest is for search results.
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