Combination of mysql / php / javascript.

SOLVED*

Bandwidth friendly would be to not use AJAX. You could load every college into a javascript array but that is silly.

really? ive heard using this jax would make the site run a lot faster, and just loading my test page with the ajax it loads super fast compared to the other page, plus its a lot more user friendly.

Using AJAX should be fine, technically it would be more bandwidth friendly, since you'd only be loading a query from the DB, rather than reloading the page or loading every entry into an array to start.

Anyway, here's what I recommend..

1. Start with a text input.
2. Add the onkeyup event to the input.
3. After the user has entered 2-3 characters, do an AJAX query.
4. A PHP script gets the query and does a SELECT to the DB.
5. PHP dumps the output from the SELECT to a JSON formatted string.
6. Change the header of the PHP return to text/plain or text/javascript.
7. Get the response back from PHP and parse it with javascript.

Read up on the json_encode() function.

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