A long while ago in a galaxy far, far away, my children made me watch a show.  "The Princess Bride."  (had you going there didn't I?)  In it, two of the main characters were playing a rhyming game and one of the characters "tires" of the whole rhyming exercise, and says, "Stop rhyming and I mean it."  To which of course the response was:

"The title of this blog."

No really, the actual title of this blog.  "Inoun, where are you going with all of this?"  Hm, I was thinking I needed a few lines of text to describe how search vectors  work.

Vector?  Yes, hector a vector.  I told my wife yesterday that I was going to be writing about vectors.  Her natural and innate response was, "You lost me at vector."  Understandable "fur sure".  Vectors are actually pretty cool, but over the years, they have gotten a really bad rap.  Kind of like the word spam.  The original spam.  The meat product has suffered ever since.

"You want me to eat what?"

At my house, we spearmint with a lot of things.  Yes, spearmint.  Everything is a spearmint.  Including words.  On a whim one day I said to the kids, "Hey, there's a can of spam in the pantry!  Let's C what we can do with it?"  It wasn't until I actually opened the can, looked at, and shared my view of the contents with my daughter she came to the full realization, I actually was serious!  Or, as we often say in our home, "are you cereal?"  So I fried up a few pieces, read the total fat content count to my kids, and made every last solitary one actually "try" a piece.  It was quite the spearmint in human nature.

And of course we couldn't help but start singing "THE" song.  But I digress.

Vectors have always been looked down upon by just about every pre-pubescent alive (since we are all currently taking algebra you know (notice the present tense here, usage of the term "we" and what that implies)), and this awful taste (algebra that is) usually sticks with every, solitary, last one of us, well into, and far beyond that abyss, we call death (that's just a fancy way of saying that few people will ever really get over it.)

But vectors are really cool!  I know, "Inoun, you already said that!"

And we use them all of the time.  "Like, you know, like, dude, ..." when some 1 tells you, after asking for directions, "Oh, yeah, sure dude, go over, uh..., that way about 30 yards and you will see it."  Or when someone at the grocery store says, "Clean up on aisle three."

I know I am over generalizing here, but we just don't realize how very cool vectors really are most of the time.  And it is usually because we call them, well, something boring, like "directions".

So, Inoun, what does this have to do with search?  Well a "hole" lot actually.  Just like in real life, vectors somewhere deep inside that little teeny tiny brain we call Bing, SharePoint Search or FAST, is processing away at a bajillion vector calculations every time you search for something, like, I don't know, so very useful, like, like, ah, like I know, "Pictures of Brittany Spears!"  Those queries, and others like them, that you keep sending "them", in my mind, rank right up there with the "other" queries like the great anti-query (a topic for another day).

Think of it!  Millions and millions of little vectors come to life, desire only to make us happy, find the "correct" answer for "just us", and all our many questions about the number 42, and then in the end, are sadly and completely wasted on actresses and that great anti-query.  But once again Inoun (you digress).

In its simplest form, the way a vector works, is by telling you how to get from point A to point B.

O so very, very useful for "stuff" in all kinds of situations.  But even cooler than that, is that it works on words and documents too!  Time for an Inoun example!

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