Engineering • Computer Engineering
From Yahoo's Directory to Vector Databases: How Search Rewrote the Rules of Data
From Yahoo's hand-curated directory in 1994 to the billion-dimensional vector spaces powering today's AI, the database underneath every search has changed beyond recognition. Here's the 30-year story of how "finding things" became a geometry problem.
S.J. Nam, Ph.D Jun 15, 2026 13 min read