BillyS - 6:33 pm on Mar 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

BillyS, what you describe - as a general matter of computation and speed - seems more related to the supplemental index pages, which IMHO G has categorized as 'not very necessary' (i.e., relegated to: 'show these feeble pages if nothing else helps'). The fact that pages with too many special characters typically get dropped into the supp index, is instructive IMO. But I don't see delivery speed as having much to do with the algo elements and filters collectively referred to as 'sandboxing.'

Your view of the sandbox is too limited. Google can be the greatest SE in the world from a "finding what I need" standpoint, but the mechanics and speed of delivering that information is just as important.

When Google designs its database, it is not the frequency of occurance that matters (number of results). It is the frequency of query. More frequent or common queries should be handled efficiently from a CPU standpoint. That is, the results are precompiled.

Google, MSN, they all realize this. Why do you think that they only return 1,000 or 250 results? Just because they have 80 million websites that qualify does not mean they are even thinking of delivering those results to the end user.

For the oddball queries, the search needs to be done "on the fly." This is computationally expensive.