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My friend Aaron and I have had a lot of crazy ideas come to our minds.

Sometimes they are “our” ideas, like the real estate hotline product we created from the VOIP integration company we founded.

Sometimes, more rarely, they’re “my” ideas. An example escapes me, but usually my ideas are already taken by somebody else.

All the rest of the time, they’re just “his” ideas, like the one he (and probably his brother, to an extent) had to develop a parental controls software package that actually worked. (That software, by the way, has been developed and was rated the #1 filter by Consumer Reports and won the Editors’ Choice Award from PC Magazine.)

Many of these ideas haven’t lived past the lunch table where they were born. Few, like those mentioned already, actually get implemented. Then there are those other ideas that were actually seriously considered.

I spent some time at the office this weekend, and one of the things that I did was to clean out my desk. I found a piece of paper, dated August 23, 2002, where I had written some thoughts about an idea that Aaron and I were actually seriously discussing.

(By the way, I find this idea insanely humorous, so feel free to laugh at us.)

Our idea: a search engine better than Google.

I’ll pause just a moment so you can stop laughing…

Ok, now that you’ve regained your composure, I’ll continue…

There are 11 points written out on this paper. Not all of them are worth putting online here, but a few of them made me laugh:

• “How to tell when site has changed?”
• “Caching…Good or bad?”
• “Need an equation for determining rank.”

I know tons more about search engines now than I did in August 2002, but I still know very little on the technology and logic behind search engines. “Need an equation for determining rank….oh!…that’s what this search engine needs!”

Hilarious.

Aaron and I eventually decided (and rightfully so) that this was something better left to the brilliant minds at the Googleplex.

Having ideas like this is a good thing. I sent a note about this to Aaron last night, and he had a very interesting reply:

“…at least we were crazy enough to think we could do it better, and took a shot at some ideas, when we realized it probably wasn’t realistic we stopped with the idea.”

He makes a good point: we gave it a shot. Where would we be if nobody ever tried inventing the light bulb? Or what if nobody figured out how to fly? Or if Google never happened? This world is better off because regular people have been crazy enough to think they can do something great, and then they succeeded.

Maybe we’re not all leading a better life because of a real estate hotline system or because of porn-filtering software. Or maybe we are.

What ideas do you have?