How to speed up autocomplete sugguestions?

Is there a way to speed up my autocomplete dropdown sugguestions?
There is a one sec delay for them to populate.
For the fast typers, they never even see the suggestions within
my applications.

For example, big search engines such as google, msn, and yahoo,
there sugguestions generate almost instantantly. 

Is this due to the fact that they use distributing computing
instead of a database?  I'm currently using a global method
that connects to a database.

Can anybody help me on how to speed up my autocomplete sugguestions dropdown?

Thanks.
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