A note to myself to write some more on search engines. I've been having thoughts agin which basically revolve around the 3 or 4 ways people use search engines viz. - when they're looking for a specific something (say, a song lyric) which uses an inverted index, when they're researching a topic (such as "neuro linguistic programming") in which case ( Read more... )

Occasionally I see people complaining that they can't search for "foo bar" in a search engine and only get back pages with that phrase in.

Want to know why? Ok, to have that ability they'd have to have an inverted index with every n-gram of words on every web page they index.

Yahoo! and Google have been having a pissing fight about whos index ( Read more... )