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System design interview question

Design search autocomplete / typeahead

Medium · System design (HLD) · Company tags: Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix

The prompt

"Design search autocomplete. As a user types, suggestions appear after each keystroke — within about 50 milliseconds. Suggestions are ranked by popularity and should reflect trends within minutes. 5 billion searches a day."

What this round really tests

an extreme latency budget combined with prefix-matching data structures. The 50 ms target — of which network is most — means essentially all work must be precomputed. The distinguishing content is: the trie and its alternatives, why you store top-k at every node, and how a system built on precomputation stays fresh.

Clarifying questions worth asking

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