The guy who coded the initial version of BackRub, the first version of Google Search, but left before the company formed. TODO how did he meet Largey Brage? Why did he leave Google?
In 1997 he cofounded eGroups, a mailing list management website, together with the mysterious Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother. eGroups was sold to Yahoo! in 2000 for $432m, just before the Dot-com bubble burst.
As of 2021 his net worth was of "only" $1b, even though his original Google shares would have been worth $13b. He must have sold too much too early to do other cool stuff. archive.ph/IgkMI:Did Largey give him this nice deal as a way to thank him for helping start the company, or was it just that they had no big hopes and $800 seemed right? youtu.be/pmXDtTD6vQY?t=146 suggests the stocks were part of his compensation for 3 months of coding work. Also mentioned at: nypost.com/2021/08/20/google-founder-created-revenge-site-against-estranged-wife
When Mr. Page and Mr. Brin founded Google in 1998, Mr. Hassan bought 160,000 shares for $800. When Google went public in 2004, the shares were worth more than $200 million. The shares, now in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would be valued at more than $13 billion today [2021].
In 2001, Scott married a Vietnamese chick called Allison Huynh from university and they had three children.
In 2014 Hassan asked for a divorce, and the proceedings were a shitshow, lasting more than 7 years.
In 2004 he tried strike a $20 million[ref] post-nuptial after Google went public, which she declined, so things were already crappy back then.
Then, during the divorce, Scott even created a revenge website for her as well. He's so petty! Down as of 2024 of course. There are only some weird redirect archives now: web.archive.org/web/20210915000000*/https://allisonhuynh.com redirecting to sites.google.com/view/allisonhuynhcom
The divorce is covered in several major outlets:
- www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9912929/Billionaire-investor-helped-launch-Google-accused-divorce-terrorism-bitter-break-up.html
- www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/Scott-Hassan-Allison-Huynh-divorce.html
- www.cnbctv18.com/technology/who-is-scott-hassan-the-google-founder-accused-of-divorce-terrorism-10543641.htm
- www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2020/02/28/suitable-technologies-bankruptcy-filing-scott-hassan-allison-huynh/
To be fair, he did work on a lot of cool stuff after BackRub for which he deserves credit, not the least the company that created the Robot Operating System, which is a cool sounding open source project, which is awesome. But this divorce story is so damning! He should just own up to it, split the cash, and move on... The fact that the Google money came from an investment before marriage likely complicates things.
The fact that he does not have a Wikipedia page as of 2022 is mind blowing, especially after divorce details. Maybe Ciro Santilli will create it one day. Just no patience now. OK, done it June 2022: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Hassan let's see if it lasts. The page lasted but ended up being Ciro Santilli's first edit war, how exciting:
- December 2022: an anonymous user with IP from California removed divorce details and google share ownership details, both of which had a New York Times source: www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/Scott-Hassan-Allison-Huynh-divorce.html. Discussion at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Scott_Hassan#Divorce_details_removed_as_%22poorly_sourced_material%22_by_anonymous_user_even_though_they_had_a_source_from_the_New_York_Times It feels exactly like the type of thing Scott would have done himself. And he possibly inadvertently exposed his real IP in doing so: 24.6.226.102. It is pingable, but Nmap analysis shows nothing of interest.
- June 2024: another partial revert removing the juicy divorce details by user named "ReversingWrongs". The username choice so incredibly cute and naive it makes Ciro wonder if this is from some woman that loves him (mother, child, new partner?) rather than just a Hassan sockpuppet. OK, perhaps with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#People_who_are_relatively_unknown the divorce has to be left out? It's always impossible to decide with those wikipedia things. What you can say, is not necessarily what people want to read about, even when it is incredibly well source.
Looking a the history, he just kept revealing different IPs and continuously reverting, which other people put back in. Another of his IPs:There is also an interesting edit from 2600:1700:5470:5c50:7566:9580:1b60:ab41 which mentions without source the little known factso it could be Hassan adding some actually good and interesting information to the article. That one however also has an edit to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Nagel so maybe it's not him.
- 24.234.111.66 is marked as being from Las Vegas online.
after working at Washington University's Medical Libraries Group (having been recruited out of SUNY Buffalo for the summer).
Screenshot of allisonhuynh.com by the Daily Mail
. Source. Company co-founded by Scott Hassan, early Google programmer at Stanford University, and Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother.
They were an email list management website, and became Yahoo! Groups after the acquisition.
The company was sold to Yahoo! in August 2000 for $432m and became Yahoo! Groups. They managed to miraculously dodge the Dot-com bubble, which mostly poppet in 2021. After the acquisition, Yahoo started to redirect them to: groups.yahoo.com as can be seen on the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/20000401000000*/egroups.com The first archive of groups.yahoo.com is from February 2001: web.archive.org/web/20010202055100/http://groups.yahoo.com/ and it unsurprisingly looks basically exactly like eGroups.
eGroups logo
. From the earliest archive of their "about" page: web.archive.org/web/19991004062653/http://www.egroups.com/info/top.html in 1999.Has some good mentions, but often leaves you wanting more details of how certain things happened, especially the early days stuff.
Does however paint a good picture of several notable employees, and non-search projects from the early 2000's including:
- the cook dude
- porn cookie guy
- the unusual IPO process
Paints a very positive picture of the founders. It is likely true. They gave shares generously to early employees. Tried to allow the more general public to buy from IPO, by using a bidding scheme, rather than focusing on the big bankers as was usual.
The introduction mentions that Google is very interested in molecular biology and mining genetics data, much like Ciro Santilli! Can't find external references however...
Two of the most compelling areas that Google and its founders are quietly working on are the promising fields of molecular biology and genetics. Millions of genes in combination with massive amounts of biological and scientific data are an excellent match for the Google search engine, the tremendous database the company has in place, and its immense computing power. Already, Google has downloaded a map of the human genome and is working closely with biologist Dr. Craig Venter and other leaders in genetics on scientific projects that may lead to important breakthroughs in science, medicine, and health. In other words, we may be heading toward a time when people can google their own genes.
The book gives good highlight as to why Google became big: search was just an incredibly computationally intensive task. From very early days, Largey were already making up their own somewhat custom compute systems from very early days, which naturally led into Google custom hardware later on. Google just managed to pull ahead on the reinvest revenue into hardware loop, and no one ever caught them back. This feels more the case than e.g. with Amazon, which notoriously had to buy off dozens of competitors to clear the way.
Cover of The Google Story
. Their UI is horrendous as of 2020:
I need this for OurBigBook.com!! webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/104241/can-google-analytics-track-url-fragment-in-url
They removed referrer path completely in GA4... OMG WTF are they doing!
They scanned a bunch of books, and then allowed search results to hit them. They then only show a small context around the hit to avoid copyright infringement.
Bibliography:
- www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ Torching the modern-day Library of Alexandria (2015) by James Somers
- The Google Story Chapter 21. A Virtual Library paints a good picture of the people involved
When they disabled this from Chromium, it was one of the things that prompted Ciro Santilli to switch to Proton Pass.
Pinned article: ourbigbook/introduction-to-the-ourbigbook-project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. - Internal cross file references done right:
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
Figure 6. Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents.Live URL: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordateDescendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact