For the big players in enterprise technology algorithms, it’s about finding big patterns beyond the data itself, New York Times Bits reports.

The explosion of online life and cheap computer hardware have made it possible to store immense amounts of unstructured information, like e-mails or Internet clickstreams, then search the stored information to find some trend that can be exploited.

The real trick is to do this cost-effectively and reuse algorithms.

Companies doing this at a large scale look for similarities between one field and another, hoping for a common means of analysis.