[HN Gopher] A smart, playful book about the underappreciated index
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       A smart, playful book about the underappreciated index
        
       Author : prostoalex
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2022-02-16 13:46 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
        
       | leobg wrote:
       | Funny. Been reading this on and off for the last few weeks. Many
       | clever tricks used today by SQLite or Google are in fact quite
       | ancient technology.
        
       | Finnucane wrote:
       | "Duncan finds analogous anxieties in our Age of Search -- the
       | suspicion that by making it ever easier to access information,
       | Google might in fact be making us lazier and dumber, allowing us
       | to glide along the shallows instead of forcing us to venture into
       | the depths. Duncan is less worried. "
       | 
       | Considering the several discussions here about how Google is
       | letting its ad business and other corporate concerns distort
       | search, and how users are trying to get around that to find
       | actually useful indexing, this seems like a fairly naive
       | response.
        
         | mountainb wrote:
         | Mainstream search provides easier access to the equivalent of
         | junk mail. Some paid search engines that index actually useful
         | information can be pretty good. But right now Google just gives
         | you the best spam that it can find, and potentially something
         | halfway useful like the digital equivalent of a catalog entry
         | for a book you can buy.
        
           | alangibson wrote:
           | There are paid search engines?
        
             | gowld wrote:
             | Lexis-Nexis
        
       | dang wrote:
       | One related post but not much there:
       | 
       |  _Index, a history of the_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597724 - Sept 2021 (2
       | comments)
        
       | bovermyer wrote:
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20220216135221/https://www.nytim...
       | 
       | I love useful indexes. I didn't realize there were books written
       | solely about them, though. I'll have to pick this up.
        
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       (page generated 2022-02-16 23:02 UTC)