waaaay back in the mid 2000s when search engines were large, complex, expensive pieces of enterprise software not unlike a commercial database, it was always as

waaaay back in the mid 2000s when search engines were large, complex, expensive pieces of enterprise software not unlike a commercial database, it was always assumed (and the customer told) that the search engine cuts corners for the sake of speed, in both indexing and searching, and that it should never be counted on as a database, or any kind of authoritative data store. it does one thing: search staggering amounts of information quickly at acceptable levels of performance and accuracy. looks like expectations have moved beyond that, which is good, but it's not an easy problem to solve... especially with billions or trillions of documents in the index. leaving out all the the important stuff that made a database slow is what made a search engine fast.