This 20-minute talk by Jeff Veen, formerly of Google, is worth blogging not just for the reflections on user interaction with data, but a quick look at how far technology has come in the last 25 years. Show it to the non-ancient geeks and tell them what it was like!
Ancient Geeks contributor Tom Gidden has long obsessed about making database text searches fast and scalable. Your RDBMS may already have full text searching, but that can’t necessarily cope with serious load.
Tom has described his version of an Inverted Index technique in an article in php|Architect magazine, but now he and a colleague have implemented the idea with MySQL stored procedures rather than PHP, and have released an open source project through Google Code. I’ll likely be using this on one of my work projects.
