I'm planning out how to track internal search data in Omniture/SiteCatalyst.
It's a fairly straight-forward plan for a standard "enter a term and get a page of results" model: set sProps and eVars with the terms, the count of results, and the page searched from, then fire a success event for searching and another for clicking a search result.
For a type-ahead search--where the user is given search results as they type in a search bar--what's a good strategy for handling the timing of event submissions so that you don't end up with different events/entries for letters 4, 5, 6, and 7 of a search term's entry?
Our solution was to leverage a delay on the autocomplete to reduce the number of calls. From a tracking standpoint, if someone pauses for 1 second (or 500 ms, whatever), then they're probably actually waiting for the autocomplete results, and that constitutes a valid search.
From a technical standpoint, we leveraged the delay option on the jQuery UI widget.