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Web apps stick to O(N) (iterate through a list) and O(N log N) (sort, some operations on indices).

If something is O(N^2) or worse, it "doesn't scale" and you won't usually see it done in a web app. That is, there's a whole shadow universe of web apps that you've never seen because the resource demands are too high.

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I disagree as well. Certainly most code that runs when you actually view a page in a web app is O(N), but there are many web apps that do backend computing that is much more complicated. Take Google and Netflix as examples.

You'd better believe that Google and Netflix have scientists who work hard every day trying to "bend the curve" towards O(N) in all of those applications.

Well, I strongly disagree with this. One example from our own applications would be O(m*n) for computing levenshtein distances between arbitrary product sets. Of course many of these are precomputed, but they are still used in a web application. Computing sales relationships would be another example.

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