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

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.