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If 100% accuracy is important then getting the top 10 from each section and then sorting then would be necessary. If you were willing to trade performance for a
by JimmyAustin 10y ago
If 100% accuracy is important then getting the top 10 from each section and then sorting then would be necessary. If you were willing to trade performance for accuracy then getting the top 1 from each section would probably give you a decent approximation.
In the perfect accuracy case, if you were grabbing the range of 990-1000, you would need to grab the top 1000 from each section, which is 100x more data transfer. I don't work for Google, but given the amount of money they spend on building their own routers, they probably want to minimise that number.
- byoung2 10y agoThe approximation is better in this case since you only have the results I return and you can't independently audit every section to see if I'm accurate. Say I return the 7 foot guy from each section, but one section only had a 6'8" guy. Meanwhile there is a section that had 10 7 footers. You can't verify that without seeing my data.