My first job in high school was adapting altavista into an interface for an internal government parts procurement tool (thrilling, right?). The Boolean operato

My first job in high school was adapting altavista into an interface for an internal government parts procurement tool (thrilling, right?). The Boolean operators let us use altavista kind of like a database layer: we offered a cartoony interface that build queries behind the scenes that hit existing parts specification documents - eliminating a giant data structuring and reentry problem. It was my first exposure to how much work could be saved by working efficiently with unstructured data! Of course, Google took this to a whole other level, realizing that for common users queries themselves should be treated as unstructured data! Learning as much as you can from how people already express themselves is one way to write the future, it turns out...