Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon, conducted an interview with Eric Matas at Technorati. Following up on being selected as “Best Search Engine” by the About Web Search Reader’s Choice Awards, Eric had this to say:

” I reached out to the CEO, Mark Cramer, who agreed to answer some questions about their search engine… By besting Google and with more than 200 million queries to date, Surf Canyon seems to be catching on.”

Here’s one interesting question and answer:

What was your most unusual job?

After my freshman year at MIT (1987) I got a summer job writing software at the Public Defender’s Office in download Boston. They had a database of case “squibs” that they wanted to be able to access through the input of combinations of keywords and Boolean operators. So I wrote one program to crawl the database, extract the words from the squibs and then assemble them in a reverse index. I then wrote a second program with a UI to accept the keyword and Boolean operator inputs, find matches in the reverse index and then print out lists of matching documents. Turns out, it worked great.