I can’t claim this idea as my own. It came up over a few beers with people from work on Friday afternoon, but still seems to be amusing enough to post a day later. I’m not naming the people involved, but if they want credit they’re very welcome to post their names, links or whatever below.

To quote from wikipedia’s science article, “science can only make conclusions about our observations of nature.”. This is quite an interesting statement with respect to the idea of ‘computer science’ where in many cases, nature, at least in a traditional sense, is more or less absent. Today I’m talking specifically about information retrieval, which is a specific branch of computer science generally concerned with what we would call searching (think Google et al).

The academic information retrieval world (which I currently work right next to but couldn’t claim to be a part of) currently has a major ‘brain drain’ towards Google, Yahoo, MSN etc where research results are not usually published. This has meant that in a lot of cases there are problems that the academic community knows are solvable because Google solves them, but but from a research perspective there is very little published to base further research on.

The logical step here is to think about these secretive web search companies as almost like nature itself, in that they begrudgingly submit themselves to be studied, but aren’t giving away any secrets easily. I just find the idea of Google being on a par with nature itself really funny.