Comment by boredguy8
14 years ago
There are always questions on the edge of computational complexity. In 30 years: "Indexing all of the individual web pages in the world used to be a tough challenge. Network speeds were in the hundreds of megabits, and..."
I would be surprised if that analogy holds up. I have heard the Google guys state that the growth of the web easily outpaces advances in computing and bandwidth. The English language, not so much...
You're missing the point. "Growth of the language" wasn't the problem for spell-check, it was the size of the language combined with limited space. Computational breakthroughs solved that problem. The parent to my post implied that solving the 'space' problem in a different way (i.e. by having more space) somehow harmed software engineering, which it hasn't. Ergo, the suggestion that the web is outpacing computing and bandwidth all the more supports my point, since that problem will be persistent.
> In 30 years: "Indexing all of the individual web pages in the world used to be a tough challenge."
Eh, that needs qualification to make sense. Just crawling and trivially tokenizing the web counts as "indexing all the individual web pages" but that's never been such a monstrous task.
Having results fresh to-the-day/hour/minute is a better example of something that will probably be looked at is child's play even though that's a very new, very computationally expensive development in search.