In my opinion, Google put the search vs. sort debate to rest a long time ago. For large, multifaceted datasets, search with faceted filters is almost always the right approach (again IMO).
Was there ever a serious "debate" regarding search versus sort? They clearly complement each other. Google, by failing to support meaningful sorts, removes a convenient way to access information.
For example, in my old mail system, I could often home in on a particular message by sorting the relevant messages by size (simple communications < code exchanges < zip files containing all project files). Gmail's search-only approach-- while no doubt theoretically pleasing to a company that cut its teeth on search-- feels like half an implementation to me.
I can't argue with that. To be more precise than my original post, Google may not be the best example here, since it implicitly sorts based on the vague notion of relevance, which is where the magic lives. I'll amend my original point to include an implied sort order that aims to please "most of the people most of the time".
I always understood the sort in "Search vs Sort" to mean manually categorising documents/things into boxes or folders. Not sort as in an SQL order by clause.
Once something is "put into a box", the "box" is just another attribute of that thing. I don't think it matters whether the user is classifying stuff arbitrarily, or the system is implying those attributes.
