This might mean using an index or catalog, for example.

If you’re trying to process or store lots of information, you need a way to quickly surface relevant information. As long as there have been books, there have been ways of categorizing information so that people can quickly find the features or content they’re looking for. Precomputation-and indexing in general-has been around for a long time. It takes a lot of work to make something look easy. The simpler, faster, and clearer your search experience, the more precomputation was performed ahead of time. In precomputation, more happens below the surface than above. Precomputation is the foundation of a scalable search experience. In other words, the more data your search engine is expected to process and sort through, the more work you should put into precomputation. The more work you do upfront to precompute the features of your index, the faster, simpler, and more user-friendly your search experience will be. In the case of search engines, which usually exist to sort and process massive amounts of data, precomputation is about feature categorization. Precomputation meaningĭefinition : Precomputation is the organizing structure through which an algorithm sorts and categorizes its data. This article will define precomputation and explain how to use it to build a scalable and user-friendly search engine.

It all comes down to an indexing philosophy and tool called precomputation. Fortunately, the first principles of a search engine have been known for decades-even before digital search engines like Google existed. And the more significant the dataset, the more potentially complex your search experience.

The most efficient way to create anything complex is to begin with the first principles.Ĭreating a search engine is indeed a complex task.

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