The book of life: Evolution of my self through incarnation 33

The jobs and works

I have earned my first money in high-school. It wasn't much but it was earned remotely, over internet, something still uncommon at the time (money was coming by regular mail in the form of cheques which I regularly had difficulties cashing in as local banks weren't accustomed to this).

My first serious work started some time during faculty and after I got married.

I have worked for a couple of years as a freelancer, and, while I was very successful, this was very stressful and not rewarding enough so I gave up eventually to work on projects of my own.

Even though I was married, I still worked most of the time I was at home, regularly exhausting myself into late hours. So this was not a typical marriage, especially because I was still working alone (my wife had no interest in computers anyway). At first my wife objected mostly because I worked a lot and yet I wasn't earning money. But I believed in my projects and my self.

I have created a website called RapidSearchEngine (RSE), it was a search engine used to search for files hosted on Rapidshare - a major file hosting/sharing provider at the time.

I created this because I wasn't satisfied with existing search engines, I wanted to make something better, mainly for myself but I was counting on something more.

My urge to support my family was present at all times during my marriage and, financially, my family never suffered. In fact, for a good part of the marriage, money was abundant.

The engine was producing very targeted quality results (at the time no other search engine produced results with matching quality, including the big ones) and its popularity grew quickly - at its peak it was, according to Alexa, among 3000 most popular sites in the world, and with 150 000 daily visitors it was worth millions.

Despite heavy loads and the big database, the site was very fast, database was replicated across 4 dedicated servers and I've been regularly optimizing the code.

I was earning good money on this but not nearly as much as I could because I wanted to keep the website clean - I hated ad infested sites and didn't like to force this on my users, this was probably the cleanest website of the type at the time.

The technology I developed for that website about 15 years ago may have been ahead of its time, because, from what I can deduce, no search engine of today is using anything similar. The quality of results in popular search engines may have even deteriorated.

The site itself was not illegal (I was receiving DMCA requests daily for link removal, but I was complying with them, just like regular search engines do) but my initial domain name had the term rapidshare in it which was a registered trademark.

This didn't went unnoticed by Rapidshare AG which threatened to sue me, although it was clearly stated on the website that I am in no way affiliated with them so people don't get confused.

Eventually they only tried to take away the domain name from me, and they succeeded.

After that, I tried running the website under a different domain, but things changed and I never managed to fully recover from the loss.

While Rapidshare was dying, file hosting services were exploding and eventually I have built a website called Sharedir, another search engine, similar to old one, but with support for multiple file hosting services. However, it was not possible any more to maintain the quality of results on my own so this website was never as successful as RSE.

Later I have incorporated a service which would enable downloading of files from multiple hosts with a single account. That had some success, but it required a lot of maintenance work, even after I made it as automated as possible.

Eventually, I have lost motivation for work on such websites, and around the age of 35, as I was beginning to transform, I decided to shut everything down.

Up to the age of 36, all the money I have earned was earned from home. A relative precursor to most people working remotely. First, during pandemics, but later, full time.