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Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

daoudclarke.net

11–20 of 151 posts

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#11
Whenever I hear about alternative search engines, I try out a few famous people hoping to see Wikipedia entries towards the top. And almost always I see nonsense.

For instance, if you search for 'Trump', the top links are

```

1. http://www.trump.de — found via Mwmbl -- Trump

2. https://itep.org/md/ — found via Mwmbl -- Trump Tax Proposals Would Provide Richest One Percent in Maryland with 69.7 Percent of the State’s Tax Cuts Earlier this year, the Trump administration r…

3. https://is.gd/mUHYTg — found via Mwmbl --- Trump embraces QAnon conspiracy because ‘they like me’ After skirting the issue for weeks, President Donald Trump offered an embrace Wednesday of the fri…

4. http://dict.cn/trump — found via Mwmbl -- trump是什么意思_trump在线翻译_英语_读音_用法_例句_海词词典

```

Surely there are millions of results more relevant to the phrase 'Trump' than trump.de. The other links aren't better. A random article from 2017? Another one from 2020. A Chinese dictionary definition of 'Trump'?

I get that search is hard, but what's going on here? You can try any phrase, and you just get weird results.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#12
post #5

I'm sure the post's author doesn't need interview advice anymore but in case there are any prospective interview candidates out there, completely freezing during an interview is a super negative signal. Even if you need to manually multiply out 2's on a whiteboard it would be more productive than saying "I don't know". In my experience the only reason you should say "I don't know" is if you're going to follow it with…

I think it's a negative signal to not have the imagination to realize that anyone who has frozen during an interview due to performance anxiety is well-aware that their freezing was likely a job-candidacy-ending mistake. This is not particularly shocking information and it makes one wonder if you think they're just doing it on purpose or something or that they have control over it.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#13
> you who ranks the search results

The actual link from it says the rankings are, like everywhere else:

> To train a learning to rank model. No matter how many queries are manually curated, most user queries will be organic because of the natural diversity of user queries. Curation is still important for these results since it impacts the machine learning model that will be trained on the curated rankings.

so this not true in the long term.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#14
Search engines are dying. Information retrieval and recommendation engines are still mostly living in the dark ages from all the work that's been done in the last 50 years.

Figure that problem out first (something novel and useful), then start marketing yourself.

Right now you just gave us a story we've all lived (academic hazing) without any plan of action -- so 2010.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#15
I sympathize with some of what the author has to say. That said, Google's choice to do business with Israel does not represent "support for genocide." It is also within their prerogative to dismiss employees who protest company policy.

Naive / biased statements such of these cause me to lend less credence to author's other points.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#17
post #5

I'm sure the post's author doesn't need interview advice anymore but in case there are any prospective interview candidates out there, completely freezing during an interview is a super negative signal. Even if you need to manually multiply out 2's on a whiteboard it would be more productive than saying "I don't know". In my experience the only reason you should say "I don't know" is if you're going to follow it with…

Asking questions irrelevant to the position is also a pretty good red flag that you don't want to work there.

Yeah. As a former interviewer: this question was stupid. Don't ask a candidate to solve a problem the machine can solve trivially via brute force.

Re: Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine

#19
post #5

I'm sure the post's author doesn't need interview advice anymore but in case there are any prospective interview candidates out there, completely freezing during an interview is a super negative signal. Even if you need to manually multiply out 2's on a whiteboard it would be more productive than saying "I don't know". In my experience the only reason you should say "I don't know" is if you're going to follow it with…

That’s pretty dumb. I want to work with people who say “I don’t know.” Edit: to clarify, your advice is good, what you said isn’t dumb. That criteria is dumb, in my opinion. I don’t want my colleagues to spend a bunch of my time guessing on an answer I could easily lookup or find on a calculator.

I agree, but as a candidate you don't have much control over the interviewer you get.
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