How to implement stackoverflow's "related questions" feature using jquery?

Question

With Stackoverflow's "Ask Question" feature, when I've finished typing the title of the question I'm asking, the area beneath the title would open up and display a list of "related questions."

How do I implement that using jquery/javascript? Is there any plugins or open source code I could use for that?

I'm building a site using Django and Solr (for fulltext search). So ideally the solution would work well with those 2 technologies.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The question of how you match the questions had been asked already.

The answer of how you should implement it in AJAX is as follows:

First, implement a web service that you can query using JavaScript, that takes a question title and returns a list of questions that seem related. Let's say the service is at http://example.com/queryRelatedQuestions, and returns a JSON object in the following form:

{
    "How to find the average speed of an African sparrow": "http://example.com/questions/1",
    "Speed of European sparrows diminishing, help ASAP": "http://example.com/questions/2"
}

Second, when the user has entered the question title (blur event of text input), query the service like this:

$.post('http://example.com/queryRelatedQuestions', {
        query: $('#title-text').val()
    },
    function(data){
        var result = ['<ul>'];
        $.each(data, function(title, url) {
            result.push('<li><a href="');
            result.push(url);
            result.push('">');
            result.push(title);
            result.push('</a></li>');
        });
        result.push('</ul>')
        $('#relatedQuestions').html(result.join(''));
    }
);