You think Google is the world's best search engine because it's good at searching? You're wrong. Google is the world's best search engine because it's good at sorting. Imagine Google had to search all their indexed webpages every time you Googled something. See you in a million years, because that's how long your query would take.
Instead, Google's algorithms sort hundreds of billions of webpages so that they can find what you're looking for almost immediately. No one quite knows how they do it, but everyone knows they do it incredibly well.
Of course, it's not just Google's algorithms that can sort well. Other search engines, email providers, operating systems, apps, and many websites have ways of organizing and sorting information so you don't have to.
Strangely, we still do. We spend hours organizing our emails, our computer files, our notes, and more. Not only that, but we often agonize over how to organize our stuff. The more stuff we have, the worse it gets. D*mn you, Big O!
We're so used to organizing things in the physical world that we mistakenly believe we have to do the same thing in the digital world. We don't. Searching is almost always faster than sorting. So if you can search, search. Let the trillion-dollar companies sort for you.
Top comments (0)