I agree. Let me put it a little differently. I think that the order of the letters and how soon they appear in the list of potentials should impact the ranking

I agree. Let me put it a little differently. I think that the order of the letters and how soon they appear in the list of potentials should impact the ranking of the results. Basically it should work like Command-T in Textmate (or the vim plugin based off of it). So if there's a Congo and a Republic of Congo in your potentials, then typing "con" should list Congo first as being a more likely result (even though in this case it may not be). In this demo, when I type "ca" the first three results are "United States, American Samoa, and Antartica". I would argue that this is less intuitive to the user than a simple alphabetical dropdown.