Joel relates an interesting way to look at the big boys of tech:
A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft. “Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement,” he said. That’s true. Google also uses full-text-search-of-the-entire-Internet the way Microsoft uses little tables that list what error IDs correspond to which help text. Look at how Google does spell checking: it’s not based on dictionaries; it’s based on word usage statistics of the entire Internet, which is why Google knows how to correct my name, misspelled, and Microsoft Word doesn’t.
date: | 2005-10-17 19:55:24 |
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wordpress_id: | 347 |
layout: | post |
slug: | a-matter-of-perspective-i-guess |
comments: | |
category: | General |