The funny thing, to me, is where I think it came from. A few months ago, while Dave and I were having lunch one day, he mentioned that he was reading a book about the history of nursing. My first thought was "that's weird," followed immediately by "I bet he'll learn something interesting that applies to programming." And sure enough, there are strong hints in Andy's talk that they learned of the Dreyfus model through historical connections with the nursing profession.
One of the slides makes this point:
Experience comes from practice. (Broad and general, not narrow and specific.)Dave and Andy certainly cast their nets wide, and they are prime examples of the value of a generalist approach.
It does seem that they're using something at least vaguely similar to PageRank -- there's definitely a feedback process involved to assess the importance of various stories. One of the nice things about this is that Google frequently features stories that are off the map for mainstream American media. I'm sure this is partly due to Google's inclusion of non-U.S. news services, but I suspect it also reflects an American population that is changing faster than the newsrooms are.
Today, I was treated to not one, not two, but three stories about Cricket on the Google News front page. What a nice surprise. (And hurray for Australia! With Shane Warne looking more powerful than ever, they're in great shape for the Ashes next month.)