The full name is the United Kingdom of Great BrITAin and Northern Ireland.

That's not good enough to explain why United Kingdom (or "the united kingdom of greAt britAin And northern ireland") sits up near the top when you type in 'A'. Who the hell formally refers to the UK with any word starting with 'A'? Anyone claiming to be from 'Albion' in a web form is just intentionally being difficult...

Wow, I think this autocomplete is too smart for its own good.

Precisely, I can't think of any situation where a user would search for a substring of a single word in the country name. If there is some edge-case where the first letter or so can be omitted that should be handled with the alternate-spellings feature.

But still, Italy should come before the UK for "ita", except maybe if geoip lookup places you in the UK.