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Automation of Searching
Search engines are amazing in their automation of the search process,
because they deliver the results of several complex and difcult sys-
tem functions in less than a second, consistently and with high quality.
Like the dial tone always present when we pick up the phone, we take it
for granted that in mere seconds we can execute a search and dive into
results. Search engines like Google combine the spiders that crawl the
Web, applications that capture text and images, many servers that store
billions of pages, indexing that allows instant retrieval, and algorithms to
serve up references in the order most probably useful to the user. These
are all wondrous functions.
However, further automation is re