Seruku. It’s dead now, but I’m proud of it.

William Grosso @ July 20, 2008

I got an email today from a consulting service looking to outsource some Lucene contracting.  Somehow, someway, they got my name and thought “Hmmm. We could send some Lucene consulting his way.”

That reminded me of the startup I founded in 2003. I was relatively new to the idea of founding my own company and, for reasons that are now completely mysterious to me, I thought that it made sense to found a shareware company¹.

I wrote a toolbar for Internet Explorer that captured all the pages you viewed, indexed them using Lucene, and exposed them via a search interface that included “date based” search. So, for example, you could say “Show me all the pages I looked at last week that involved animals.”

It worked beautifully, did everything I expected it to, and was a highly polished piece of software.

It also didn’t sell very well.

But it was a good piece of software, and a good idea². And, to this day, I treasure Gary Price’s review. He understood what I was doing, what the goal was, and, after a very fair and balanced review, concluded by saying

Kudos to Grosso for not only developing this product but also for making it so easy to use.

When you’re out on a limb, building something new for the very first time, it’s nice to get some praise.

1. In 2003. Roughly a billion years after the internet changed everything.↩
2. Lots of people were building similar things at the time. And, for years afterward, I would get phone calls from people looking to enter the space. They often wanted me to sign an NDA before telling me that they planned to compete with me.↩

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