Monthly Archives: January 2016

Quora Answer: My son got an offer from a 1-year-old startup by some very senior folks from Google. The pay is good and product idea is good, but it’s a startup. He asked for our advice on this. What are some suggestions from people from relevant fields?

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora.

I joined a startup founded by ex-Google people in 2010 as the third engineer. I worked there for 2 years, had a great time, learned a ton, got my first patent out of the process, and the experience is one of the best I’ve ever had. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

The only reason I didn’t stay is because California wasn’t for me, but the startup is still going, and it feels like my shares are a pocket full of scratch-off lottery tickets. They could end up failing, but they won’t.

1-year-old is probably the best time to join a startup with solid backing, and even though being ex-Google doesn’t necessarily make you smarter or more likely to succeed than anyone else, it sure makes it easier to get funded.

In the worst scenario, they’ll run out of money and he’ll have to spend three or four weeks looking for a job. If he has any skill and/or motivation, he’ll be so much smarter and better for the experience that it’ll be really hard to NOT get hired for something new.

That’s the big fear fallacy with startups — that they’ll fail and you won’t be able to get a job. But all of the things you go through in making a serious go of building a startup make you so much better at what you do that there’s nothing to fear. I like to think of the experience factor as being 2 to 1. If you spend 2 years in a startup it’s a similar learning experience to spending 4 years at a stable company.

The fatigue factor is also similar. I feel like software can be a very mentally taxing and draining endeavor, so a 6-month sabbatical every 5 years is almost a must unless you’re in a perfect environment. Being in a startup shortens that “wear out” time, so you might need to take a break every 2-3 years in order to remain healthy and sane.

The most important thing to do if you’re considering joining a startup is to make sure the people running it are somewhat-well-adjusted grownups, or at least likely to become so in the near future.

WbSrch Launches New WbBrowse Web Browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Reprint of a press release originally published on PRWeb at https://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/01/prweb13179551.htm.

The independent search engine WbSrch just launched a new desktop web browser called WbBrowse.

WbBrowse supports tabbed browsing, is free, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and is available at http://wbbrowse.com

“The major search engines all have their own browsers. It’s a good way for new users to discover your service, and an easy way to for them to return to it later. Even though the first release of WbBrowse doesn’t have all of the features of the top browsers yet, we think it’s pretty good for a 1.0 release.”

WbSrch also has OpenSearch plugins that can be added to any OpenSearch-capable browser, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.

WbSrch is a general-purpose search engine based in Portland, OR, that was created in 2013 and launched in 2014.

Quora Answer: What is the minimum number of pages a modern general search engine would have to index to be useful?

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora.

“Useful” is a very subjective question. People who frequently ask deep and complex language-and-algorithm-specific software engineering questions will require different levels of depth than those who travel a lot and just want to find good prices on airfare and the top 5 restaurants and hotels in each city.

If you have /really/ good algorithms, you can build a search engine that is “good” for people who don’t require much depth with about 100 million pages. For people who require depth, you could probably be pretty useful at about 1 billion pages.

This depends HEAVILY on what you choose to include and exclude. Are these pages all in a single language? Or is this just 100 pages each from the top 1 million sites regardless of language and content?

Even though the web is phenomenally huge, much of it is duplication and/or computer-generated spam. There are millions of sites that are just scrapes/dumps of other sites (especially Wikipedia) and indexing 1000 copies of Wikipedia with different CSS isn’t going to get you very far.

Think about the sites you visit regularly, and about those that regularly turn up in searches. How many of those useful sites are below the top 100,000? Does it matter if there are 100 million+ domains when 99.9% of your needs are covered by the top 0.1%? With a smaller index, choosing what you leave out is pretty important.

There’s a site I like to play with when trying to find obscure results, it’s fun for experimenting with and it helps you understand how much the size/quality of your index affects your results: Million Short