ACM Queue - A Conversation with Matt Wells - When it comes to competing in the search engine arena, IS bigger always better?
To understand the direction search is taking, it helps to know what search is. Search is a natural function of the brain. What it all comes down to is that the brain itself is rather like a search engine. For instance, you might look out the window and see your car. Your brain subconsciously converts the image of your car into a search term, not too unlike the word car itself. The brain first consults the index in your short-term memory. That memory is the fast memory, the L1 cache so to speak. Events and thoughts that have occurred recently are indexed into your short-term memory, and, later, while you are sleeping, are sorted and merged into your long-term memory. This is why I think you sometimes have weird dreams. Thoughts from long-term memory are being pulled into short-term memory so they can be merged and then written back out to long term, and you sometimes notice these thoughts while they are being sorted.
