>What surprised me was that Larry Page had lots of trouble getting his crawler and indexer to work, partly because he was in Levy's words "not a world-class programmer" but also because of lots of bugs in the brand new and still unstable language he was using, which was called Java.
Hey this is really strange. My user agent was not set (I thought but it was a different issue) and so I googled other solutions besides System.setProperty("http.agent", ""); and so I stumbeled over this entry. Nothing related to your finding :)
Then I posted it on twitter and yesterday on hackernews. That's why I thought that it was my finding. Sorry :)
Hey. Sorry for the comment on the other thread ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2459123 ), I was thinking "damn, why didn't I submit this separately?", I thought it was a weird coincidence.
I think it was linked on Twitter / Buzz a few months ago (that's where I first heard of it), and that may have improved the post's ranking on Google, which would explain how you stumbled on it 15 years later ;)
Anyway, I'm glad you shared it, since lots more people got to see it.
Reminded me of:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/browse_thread/...