In 2005, Joel Spolsky commented:

... A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft. "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement," he said. That's true. Google also uses full-text-search-of-the-entire-Internet the way Microsoft uses little tables that list what error IDs correspond to which help text. Look at how Google does spell checking: it's not based on dictionaries; it's based on word usage statistics of the entire Internet ...

... yes, and maybe the magic comes from the combination of:

• higher level thinking about the problem to be solved
• bigger data within which to average and discover relevant cases
• deeper foundations from the mathematical world to build upon

... and of course it's not only Google and not always Google that works at the Venn Diagram intersection of those three zones ...

... and perhaps there's a fourth dimension, involving speed of computation (or number of fundamental information-theoretic operations performed) ...

... and "do less, better" applies here, as it does everywhere in life ...

... and don't forget Category Theory, and Haskell, as in Eric Kidd's 2007 essay "Bayes' rule in Haskell, or why drug tests don't work" that quotes Joel Spolsky ...

(cf "How Do I Love Thee?" (Sonnet 43) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Mantra - Be Time (2017-01-07), ...) - ^z - 2018-12-07