Excerpt :
“It may turn out that tremendously large volumes of data are sufficient to skip the theory part in order to make a predicted observation. Google was one of the first to notice this.”
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/06/the_google_way.php
note: found thanks to the p2p research list
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org