Hi,
2. I understand, but that would require an external service to run extremely fast search queries. Some plugins offer such features, but they usually have monthly subscription fees.
This plugins runs on your local server, and does not require any subscription fees ($100+/year), however the performance depends on your local server speed because of that. In your case I am seeing response times of about 1 seconds measured: https://i.imgur.com/0ip4q58.png
That is actually a really great response time. You can check out this documentation to see how you can maximize that.
3. We are planning to add an optional “dropdown” of choices to start the search after that. It should give more of a google-like experience.