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In the close-as-off-topic list, the migration autocomplete catches the URLs of the sites. This limits its usefulness for strings like "com" since almost all sites end in "stackexchange.com".

I think it would better if the autocomplete only catches the first part of the URLs (till the first dot), that would increase its usefulness.

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Since the following "p" reduces the set of all sites down to the 3 that would matter...is this really an issue?

Let's see the list "co" would still match if we didn't match the full URLs:

  • Cooking
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Code Review
  • Code Golf
  • Bitcoin
  • Economics
  • Computational Science
  • Cognitive Sciences
  • Computer Science

...not a very specific list. If we check "com":

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Science

The difference in the same, "comp" or stripping out ".com" - it's literally 1 character here by the numbers. I'd rather leave it working in a consistent way...vs. possibly breaking non-.com domains later.

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    Well we could drop the .com for all compares, pretend the thing being matched is just physics.stackexchange .. Course you could make the same argument for .stackexchange really
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Apr 21, 2012 at 23:01
  • 2
    I think part of the problem is it doesn't start autocompleting at the start of words...the first result for U is Android Enthusiasts, not User Experience...
    – Zelda
    Commented Apr 22, 2012 at 1:18
  • even one letter is one letter if you are doing it repeatedly. I think Ben has a good point also, matching initial parts seems more reasonable, I don't have statistics but my guess is that matching initial parts can be more helpful.
    – Kaveh
    Commented Apr 22, 2012 at 3:18
  • If we get to a point where we need to search in that dialog on the full DNS name (because we have non-.com DNS names in there), then we're using the wrong UX at that point.
    – casperOne Mod
    Commented Apr 22, 2012 at 15:05
  • I'm going to hold off on changing this, as there may be other area51-related migration changes in the future that'll likely change the behavior again here.
    – Nick Craver Mod
    Commented Apr 22, 2012 at 23:41

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