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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Why didn't you update your primary index for several months? Were there serious technical breakages?

Internal issues I'm not comfortable talking about in depth. It was a combination of technical problems and political problems; I expect any specific person's opinion of the percentage breakdown of those factors depends a lot on which group they were in at the time.

> I expect any specific person's opinion of the percentage breakdown of those factors depends a lot on which group they were in at the time.

I feel like that tells me where your percentage would lie...

EDIT: I apologize, it was intended as a joke to lighten the mood. It's never a good thing to lose one's job or have a company fail, even that long ago, so my response is to attempt humor.

> > I expect any specific person's opinion of the percentage breakdown of those factors depends a lot on which group they were in at the time.

> I feel like that tells me where your percentage would lie...

Are you responding to BryantD's admission of (widespread) bias by accusing BryantD of bias? This seems to add nothing to the conversation.

I apologize, it was intended as a joke to lighten the mood. It's never a good thing to lose one's job or have a company fail, even that long ago, so my response is to attempt humor.

> I apologize, it was intended as a joke to lighten the mood. It's never a good thing to lose one's job or have a company fail, even that long ago, so my response is to attempt humor.

I see; I incorrectly read it as accusatory. Thanks for the very civil reply!

> I incorrectly read it as accusatory.

That's okay, I have a very dry sense of humor and straight-faced delivery in person as well. Which is unfortunate because it means I can't blame the lack of tone online when jokes don't land, they often don't in person either.

No offense taken!

With your insight, could you say if AV had the same business plan as google? To gather data about people and shape services with it?

Not an insider, but I doubt it; this was the early commercial web, and business plans just weren't that sophisticated. People were building multi-million dollar companies on things that you could write in a long lunch hour today.

Honestly, I doubt that was even Google's plan for the first years of its existence. It was more "Hey, we made this neat search thing, let's see if we can figure out a way to make money from it".

At least some people in the TWIT podcast family have repeated many times the idea that Brin or Page had at one point said early on that "advertising ruins things" and this wasn't their initial goal.

I don't know if the information is true, but I know I've heard it more than once.

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