[Air-l] net neutrality by another name, oecd report

[elw at stderr.org]

> Large music databases, iTunes, CDBaby, Amazon, etc, use a cacheing 
> device to improve the efficiency of their searches.  This device makes 
> the most popular search results more readily available than the rest, 
> which works well for most searches (on a zipf curve distribution). 
> However, it significantly disadvantages the less-popular artists/results 
> - to the point of virtual exclusion - for example, on searches for 
> versions of "The Lord's Prayer" in iTunes, in which the versions by the 
> more popular artists drown the versions by less popular artists ...


That's likely a bug in their particular software implementation, not a bug 
in the intellectual idea of database caches.

What *should* happen, should your search not result in any hits in the 
cache, is that the site's software issues a hugely more expensive search 
against the whole dataset.  If you're seeing a truncation due to a 
particular search term being less than popular, it seems likely that the 
site operators would appreciate the generation of a reproducible bug 
report.

Several sites (livejournal, citeulike, etc) use memcached for this sort of 
database caching - and it doesn't seem to have the 'ill' mis-behavior that 
you're describing.

--e