"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Friday, December 10, 2004

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...

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About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.