I have an autocomplete for a restaurant finder I'm currently putting live:
After typing 3 characters, there's a backend AJAX call to the server that returns a list of either locations or restaurants matching your search. As part of the search form, I also have the More Options button, which causes a div to slide down below the form, where you can choose cuisine etc. I don't really allow free text search: as you type, the first element in the list will always be selected. However, you always need to hit the green search button to perform the search.
My question is, should I simply perform the search as soon as you physically select something from the dropdown? It doesn't give the user much chance to fill out the 'More options' if they want to, although I do display the full form on a search results page for a location, but not on a restaurant detail page. So, they could search for a location, then click More options for further refinement.
If I were to perform the search automatically then the green search button is fairly useless, unless you're on a search results page, you want to stay in the same location but have added more filtering: in that instance I'd need the button. Is that acceptable?
TlDR: should I click-and-go on selection from the dropdown?
Any thoughts suggestions would be much appreciated.