You Aren't Gonna Need It

A fun, insightful explanation from Tim Bray on a really big problem you're not going to need to solve...

You... don’t want to have to temporarily store millions of values while you do the sort.

Here’s the trick: nobody will ever look at more than the first hundred or so results. So you don’t have to sort at all, you just have to find the highest relevance values. Here’s the algorithm...