freejung - 8:16 pm on Mar 12, 2012 (gmt 0)

What I find most interesting is the discussion of the tradeoff between doing things perfectly and using less resources. Even what seems like a relatively simple task like spell checking consumes vast resources when done on Google's scale. It's worth remembering when we're thinking about why other parts of the algo work they way they do - it may be the result of a similar tradeoff, where Google is doing things in a way that they know is sub-optimal in order to save resources.