"Cool and quiet" search box

It's cool (and a bit web2.0) to have a search box which works as soon as we cease typing, and displays new contents in the very page we're navigating.

The concept of "typing ceased" is tricky anyway; it's not cool (and not quiet!) to have the page refreshed soon after the onKeyUp event, because maybe we're still typing the whole word.

So, it takes a bit of javascripting:

function lookupStuff(flag) {
 if (flag) {
  do_things();
 } else {
  clearTimeout(timerid);
  timerid = setTimeout("lookupStuff(true)", 1000);
 }
}

If we bind this to the onKeyUp event of an text input form, we have do_things() called after 1 second, which is enough for typing anything; clearing the timer is useful for "jittered" key pressing.

This snippet has been tested successfully on every browser, and appears pretty usable.