Transcript:

Okay, continuing our discussion on sort versus search. Last time, I said it is better to err on the side of messiness. That does not mean you completely randomly do nothing. No. So here's what it means.

Let's say you want to organize your home library. It is absolutely pointless to sort all the books by author name or title name or whatever because anything that you have sorted but you have not searched for it is a complete waste of effort.

So, for home library, it is beneficial to categorize books. So, all the physics books on one side, all the cooking books on one side, all the comics are together, all the self-help or meditation or all the astrology books are together. And as long as these are in general categories, they're very well organized because it is faster to search by your eye for what you're looking for than to sort by your hand.

Okay, so that's for home libraries. In fact, look at all the companies, look at Amazon. Amazon warehousing, hardly anything is sorted. It is RFID tagged so that it can be located, but nothing is sorted.

But Amazon has taken it one step further. They have figured out the importance of caching. So, fast-moving products are categorized into one location, and this caching speeds up the search.