The content of my main web application, Myhealthcaresource, will contain more than 15000 detailed financial reports for nursing facilities at its future peak.  Each of these reports contains textual information as well as monetary values.  It might list administrator names, employee names/salaries, owners, products or services purchased.  I wanted to have all of this information searchable on Google, without Google caching the page.  I also wanted to let users who came from Google as a result of searching for this information see it without having to log in, but only the page that they found through Google search. Continue reading →

Have you ever found yourself slightly modifying a URL to try to find something you know used to exist or should exist but you keep getting that dreaded 404 page?  Perhaps you were trying to find something that shouldn’t be online anymore but it was simply unlinked to, benevolent purposes or otherwise? Another example might be that a site’s main homepage is down and so many users are unable to access the site.  If they had a list of URLs they could see which are still valid very quickly with the URL Archive and go to the site through those URLs.  Google cache and Wayback Machine get you pretty close to what you’re after but sometimes they just fall a little too short.  Some things are beyond even Google’s giant umbrella of web applications (at least for now).

I’m sure an application focusing more on URLs is somebody’s 10% project somewhere sitting on the backburner until they have time to finish it.  It seems like almost anything you’d want to do has a corresponding web application.  When I come across a need that doesn’t I just feel like that void should soon be filled.  I’m going to outline the application that I believe would fill this void.  Maybe in future posts I’ll also walkthrough my attempts to do it as my personal .5% project. Continue reading →

Around November 2007 I managed to get into Google’s Boston office for an interview.  I had always wanted to interview at Google and this was the opportunity I had been waiting for.  I had applied many times in the past, but never got anything except a generated rejection letter.  Before I got my interview and while I was studying I searched endlessly online for any tips that might help me succeed and to know what to expect.  There are plenty of resources, and I’ll highlight a couple of them.  I’m not going to reproduce what’s already been said.  I’m just going to tell the story of my visit to the Google Boston office starting with my early attempts to get an interview and ending with the actual interview and my reactions to it.

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