Google: When Old Meets New and Is Discovered by Others
August 25, 2008
I just updated my Google patent document collection. I have not done a comprehensive count, but Google’s patent production has slowed. When I get the month by month data, I will post a summary here.
Someone forwarded me Jeremy Zawodny’s Web log post “Dumber Is Faster with Large Data Sets (and Disk Seeks). You can read the full article here. For me the most interesting point in the post was:
Put another way, taking the brain-dead stupid, non-SQL, mainframe-like approach got me results 12 times faster than doing it the seemingly “correct” way.
Mr. Zawodny is a former Yahoo Jedi knight and current database guru. What surprised me is that today’s Jedi’s assume that solutions developed decades ago work. If you poke around the Google patent documents, you may, as I have, identified some “old fashioned” concepts. The rush to reinvent the wheel may prevent some organizations from mining older technologies for good ideas. Perhaps Mr. Zawodny will continue to speak out, saying “Dumber is faster.”
Stephen Arnold, August 25, 2008
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