Where did the idea for Simpy come from?
Otis: The very original problem I wanted to solve was to index the content of bookmarked pages. I realized I had over a thousand bookmarks locked up in my browser, but could never really find anything in the forrest of folders and with the browser bookmark search functionality limited to bookmark titles. The interesting stuff one wants to find lives in the body of a bookmarked page, not its title, yet only title is searchable from within a browser. I’ve always been interested in information gathering (hence my interest in Nutch) and search (hence my interest in Lucene and Solr), so I built Simpy to, among other things, crawl and indexed people’s bookmarks and provide a Google-like full-text search over one’s bookmarks. This was back in 2002/2003. The idea and the service functionality has evolved a lot since then. Allen: Can you share some information about your users? Otis: As you can imagine, they are active Web users who tend to be Internet savvy. I think they like Simpy for its pow
