The Old New Thing

Amazing, but I've seen things like this before.  Back when I use to op a web designer's channel on irc, somebody was looking for webdevs for his site and he expected to pay no compensation.

He said, "I'm doing this for free, so why can't you?".

If you follow the below post and the comments thereto, including the follow-on post it references, you'll find that there have been offers to clone Google before, as well as accounting systems ($200 offered) and even Windows XP.

"Offers" like this are just the tip of the iceberg.

Best,

--Bob Grommes

http://bobondevelopment.com/2007/01/19/software-cheap/

http://bobondevelopment.com/2007/02/23/more-on-cheap-software/

You don't need to make a search engine like Google. Most of them already like Google. If you find one that doesn't, you will be unlikely to change it's mind. Search engines are stubborn that way.

Reminds me of the $1000-$3000 operating system...

http://www.getacoder.com/projects/operating_system_42879.html

SM, the funniest of all might be the bids themselves :-D

Perhaps we are reading too much into it ... and missing context. Perhaps only the user interface has to look like Google's.

It sounds like they want Lucene/Hadoop, an open-source implementation of core Google technologies (including GFS and MapReduce).

Oh, okay. write a page that calls google on the backend and delivers the results in a list, just like google. Simple, cheap, and completely unusable for any commercial venture for lots of obvious reasons.

I could easily make a search engine like Google.

Programming it to LOVE Google might be a harder task.

My dept received a request like this from an internal customer a few months ago.  Only they wanted a quote on a search engine better than Google.

I SO wanted to quote them $Texas.

cashto, funniest comment i've read on this blog in ages. nice work.

Done. I call my invention Googol.

Search Googol:

<form action="http://www.google.com/search" method="get">

 Query: <input type="text" name="q">

 <input type="submit" value="Search!">

</form>

Do I get money now?

It's sad that this was removed from Craigslist. Have a sense of humour! Oh well. There's plenty of this stuff on sites like "rent a coder" where people from Russia & India will do this kind of work for $10 an hour. Of course many of the job offers say "I already hired someone to do this once before but they did a terrible job."

>people from Russia & India will do this kind of work for $10 an hour

More like $10 a day :(

>> $10 an hour

It's about the pay of many senior programmers here in Italy.

A net of 1500€/month is not unusual.

[1500/20/8 = 9.38€/hour net].

Yeah, but you guys in Italy get more holidays than more or less anywhere else in the world. Which probably increases your hourly rate somewhat and then if you make this your gross salary the true value is probably closer to double or tripple what  you quote. And I'm sure no freelancer worth his salt in Italy charges 9EUR/hr.

----"Yeah, but you guys in Italy get more holidays than more or less anywhere else in the world."-----

No they don't; Sri Lanka has the most. You need a multi-religous society to get all the holidays.

"Reminds me of the $1000-$3000 operating system..."

Programming is just typing. If someone with a philosophy degree can't clone Windows for 3 grand, obviously the European Commission needs to be notified.

I looked at odesk.com, they claim that the average worker is making $15/hour. But there are definitely some people making less than $10. I guess it's better than a kick to the head.

> It's about the pay of many senior programmers here in Italy.

Hey, you get good football, nice warm climate and splendid coffee. Why code at all?

Oops, I guess the European Commission was listening. Sorry about that.

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