Boolean searches are named for George Boole. He used to be a ragpicker in central London. When somebody asked George for a rag of a certain sort he would grab a string and pull out the rag from a massive pile according to a secret code he had. Some thought it was a heirarchy some thought it was colour coding, some pattern adjacency matrices, others put it down to radix distribution because he sure was fast. He explained that he rapidly eliminated rags that did not fit the description as each rag in his heap was thrown in certain places according to a rule according to size, colour, weave, material, age and other things. When you combined all the categories of the way you could look at it, there was never more than logtothebasecategory rags in any one category-pile, and at any grab of any group of say 30 rags, the character of that group would be instantly visible, and the position of the desired rag would be indicated by its position in relation to the grab due its categorical characteristics in the heirarchical heap. Thus there was "category" paths to the rag desired branching from each grab, and the rule to define the path was evident from the state of the rags in the pile. Of course he could look at a chart and see that and then dive in to the pile. He had two helpers Whitehead and Russel who used to figure out how to ask him for what rags such that what rags were produced were the suitable rags for the purpose. The published a book on the rag determination called Principia Ragmatchica.
There was a guy who used to run the warehouse for a railroad in the States with 2 million parts. With no charts or bins or seeming organization it never took him more than a minute to find any part. That is the value of key employees.
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