Google rejected me and now I'm building a search engine
A blog post about being rejected by Google and later building an alternative search engine prompts broader debate on tech interviewing and search quality. Commenters argue over whether trivia-style whiteboard questions and pressure to never say “I don’t know” meaningfully assess engineering skill, sharing stories of hostile or irrelevant interviews and their impact on anxious candidates. Others examine the fledgling search engine itself, criticizing its ranking quality and the clickbait framing of the story, while some welcome any new competitor to Google despite concerns about motivations and marketing tactics.
Interview question and “I don’t know”
- Large subthread on whether “I don’t know” is acceptable in interviews.
- Some argue freezing or offering nothing is a strong negative; candidates should at least reason aloud, make a best attempt, or say “I don’t know, but I’d try X.”
- Others strongly prefer direct honesty and dislike performative guessing, especially for trivial facts easily looked up.
- Several note that interviews are not real work: being pushed for instant mental math under pressure tests performance-anxiety handling more than problem-solving.
Critiques of tech interview culture
- Many see trivia-like or irrelevant questions (e.g., counting bits, precise time units, CSV-library minutiae) as low-signal and ego-driven.
- Stories of hostile or demeaning interviewers (including founders/CEOs) are common; commenters frame these as red flags about company culture.
- Some emphasize interviews as conformity and “dance” tests that select for those who play the game, not necessarily the best engineers.
- Others defend such questions as quick, standardized ways to see how candidates tackle unfamiliar problems or approach limits of their knowledge.
Search engine project and competition with Google
- Mixed reception to building a Google competitor: some welcome more search diversity; others doubt viability against a monopoly and note most attempts fail.
- Several focus on ranking quality: examples show bizarre results for common queries, leading to criticism that ranking is currently “wrong.”
- The developer acknowledges ranking issues and ongoing work; curated rankings are mentioned as a training signal for learning-to-rank models, but cannot cover all queries.
- One commenter sketches a “web-spidering firehose” service as an alternative infrastructure for many downstream search/indexing products.
Clickbait, marketing, and post removal
- Multiple comments say the “Google rejected me” framing is clickbait for a 15-year-old event, primarily used as content marketing for the search engine.
- The author later takes the page down, stating it attracted the “wrong sort of attention” and didn’t promote the engine as intended.
Politics, ethics, and “evil”
- Brief but heated debate on whether Google’s work with Israel constitutes support for genocide, with opposing views and links to human-rights reporting.
- Longer philosophical tangent on what constitutes “evil” and how large systems can facilitate harmful outcomes; others push back as overly abstract or exaggerated.