How to return jquery autocomplete result to the separate div?

The appendTo option does indeed work as expected, and if you inspect at the DOM, the <ul> results element will be attached to the element. However, due to absolute positioning generated by jQueryUI, the list still appears directly under the <input>.

That said, you can override the internal _renderItem to directly append results to a completely different element, for example:

HTML

<input id="autocomplete"/>
<div class="test">Output goes here:<br/><ul></ul></div>

JavaScript

$('input').autocomplete({
    search: function(event, ui) {
        $('.test ul').empty();
    },
    source: ["something", "something-else"]
}).data('autocomplete')._renderItem = function(ul, item) {

    return $('<li/>')
   .data('item.autocomplete', item)
   .append(item.value)
   .appendTo($('.test ul'));
};

I have also created a demo to demonstrate this. Please note that the latest jQuery library has not had jQueryUI tested against it fully, so I am using the previous version which allows me to select to include jQueryUI directly with the jsFiddle options.

<div class="test">Output goes here:<br/></div>

<script>
  $("input#autocomplete").autocomplete({
    source: ["something", "something-else"],
    appendTo: ".text",
    position: { my: "left top", at: "left bottom", of: ".test" }
// other options here
  });
</script>

I needed more control over where to put the data, so this is how I went about it:

$("#input").autocomplete({
    minLength: 3,
    source: [
        "ActionScript",
        "AppleScript",
        "Asp"
    ],
    response: function(event, ui) {
        console.log(ui.content);
        // put the content somewhere
    },
    open: function(event, ui) {
        // close the widget
        $(this).autocomplete('close');
    }
});