Is it just me or is this a silly article? I'm not really sure what the point is. There's the overweighted focus on hardware which isn't what makes writing a search engine hard. Then there's the pseudo code towards the end which really made the whole things bizarre.<p>
Its seems that search (at least text search) is more or less a solved problem. Trying to innovate in the search space today is more or less as futile as trying to innovate in the operating systems space about 10-12 years ago. Noone really cares given that the state of the art works quite well.