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Sergey Brin, Please Pick up your Paychecks

220 points| octonion | 13 years ago |angrystatistician.blogspot.com | reply

84 comments

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[+] jconley|13 years ago|reply
I wrote most of this app on a contract nearly 10 years ago. We used it as a mentorship exercise to train state worker programmers in the SCO department on the (then new) ASP.NET Framework and SQL Server 2000. The DBA was familiar with Oracle and mainframes, but not SQL Server. It was written in ASP.NET 1.1 and used SQL Server 2000. From what I can tell it hasn't changed much at all.

"Programmer and database types will notice one problem immediately - no fuzzy string matching."

Yeah, I really wanted to implement that. The problem was we had to use Microsoft SQL Server and no third party database/indexing systems. SQL Server's Full Text Indexing run took too long during the nightly import job on year 2000 commodity hardware. We also had to do all of this within the constraints of training state workers and handing off something they could actually maintain.

Ah, the joys of state contracting.

[+] jconley|13 years ago|reply
I see there are plenty of posts down below that are complaining about the lack of fuzzy search. By all means, crawl the site and create a better search engine. IIRC it is setup in such a way that new records are always appended at the end of the ID space. Just check every night for new things. At the time we wrote this there were a few companies doing just that, charging a small fee, and soliciting people that were owed large sums. I mean, you've got a $6B market, in just California, to play with where you could probably earn 5% or more as a finders fee to those that don't know this is public record, or might just pay you to avoid the hassle of the paperwork.

There was also a web service interface to this system that returned paged results as plain ole XML, but unfortunately I don't remember the URL. We had wanted to expand and create an interstate network by partnering with Texas and some others, but it never panned out for reasons I forget.

[+] ratsbane|13 years ago|reply
It is really nice to have the original author show up and comment on something like this.

After looking at this site I started thinking about ways of crawling the whole database. The 500-record limit would make an alphabet tree crawl a bit more challenging but not too bad. Do you think the state agency would be amenable to requests for bulk download?

[edit] just saw your post which answered most of my questions while I was typing them.

[+] danboarder|13 years ago|reply
I have lived in several states including CA and found four claims for myself in the CA system due to forgotten accounts from prior addresses, here are a few that might be typical examples of what is being held in this program:

1. Pacific Bell Telephone Company $72.24

2. Verisign (SSL or domain payments) $73.50

3. 20 shares of TravelZoo stock ~$400.00 value?

That TravelZoo stock was from back in the crazy/genius dotcom days when they gave out free stock for email referrals and sign ups. :) They did something right since they are still in business.

I do appreciate this program as these were my oversight/losses, things I had forgotten. However the process to place claims is a bit of a hassle: I need to physically print out forms, include copies of ID, etc. I'll write up a blog post of the process of claiming it when it's all said and done.

[+] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
A very interesting blog post. The key idea is here: "Programmer and database types will notice one problem immediately - no fuzzy string matching. If your name or address was misspelled on the assets, or munged in the recording process, tracking down any assets belonging to you could become a difficult to impossible process. Given that this database has at most 18 million rows, there's no excuse for such a basic (and important) feature to be missing." A lot of government databases could improve usability enormously by implementing that suggestion.
[+] glaugh|13 years ago|reply
When I was in college I spent a summer going through Alaska's database (it was downloadable), cross referencing with a people search engine, and then mailing letters to people to tell them that they had missing money and how to claim it (and asking for a 5% cut). Made a decent summer's wage. Pretty sure I could have made a ton more money but it was pretty boring work so I just focused on school and more professional internships after that.

Still, an opportunity for someone feeling entrepreneurial out there.

[+] Matt_Mickiewicz|13 years ago|reply
Only 5%? That's cheap... you should have taken the fee model from collection agencies, and taken 20%+.
[+] gojomo|13 years ago|reply
A "Steven [P] Jobs", of Palo Alto and Woodside, has a bunch of small insurance, share, and dividend amounts due, including for example:

http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/NoticeDetails.aspx?propertyRecI...

I suppose Oracle Shareowner Services has had a hard time reaching this reclusive character since their last reported contact date of "10/2/2008".

[+] 10dpd|13 years ago|reply
The address, 2101 WAVERLY ST PALO ALTO, does indeed confirm this is the late Steve Jobs.
[+] Mithrandir|13 years ago|reply
Apparently, Barack Obama has $250 in unclaimed cashier's checks from First Republic Bank: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

Also, looks like Woz hasn't claimed his $5.61 from Apple yet: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

Edit: Related to an article posted earlier about John Draper/Cap'n Crunch, looks like he has some property to claim too:

http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

Edit 2: Hmm, looks like Jesus Christ has some unclaimed property too: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe..., http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe..., http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

So I guess some of this is people using fake names.

[+] ComputerGuru|13 years ago|reply
Is it just me, or is it really creepy that anyone can dig up this sort of info about your income/pension/insurance/etc?

Illinois' search is no better, but it does not display dollar amount details: https://icash.illinois.gov/

[+] kalleboo|13 years ago|reply
In Sweden, tax records are public information, so every year around tax time, tabloids will print long lists of names of "the richest people in YOUR neighborhood". Compared to that, this is nothing.
[+] jack-r-abbit|13 years ago|reply
It is also creepy that you can just keep incrementing the property id in the URL and churn through the results.
[+] redegg|13 years ago|reply
Property tax searches are a great way to DOX someone, btw.
[+] sailfast|13 years ago|reply
A couple of states seemed to have outsourced this (Ohio, most notably) to another site - missingmoney.com. When searching for first and last names it returned likely matches as well, so perhaps they've implemented some fuzzy string matching along the way that will help citizens find what's owed.

Side note: As a result of this article I found >100 bucks owed to family members which will be a great boon to them. Thanks for posting.

[+] saundby|13 years ago|reply
My nephew has $0.26 coming to him. I wonder if he'll track down a notary for the form that will charge less. Next question is: drive in the form or mail it? ;)
[+] javanix|13 years ago|reply
Haha, Mark Zuckerberg (and Randi too) have a couple on there as well.
[+] octonion|13 years ago|reply
I just found someone who has over $50000 coming to them. Unusual name, so they were easy to locate on LinkedIn and Facebook.
[+] slashclee|13 years ago|reply
I wonder what kinds of safeguards they have in place to prevent people with the same name from claiming each other's things.
[+] jyap|13 years ago|reply
You need to enter in your SSN/Tax ID/FEIN.
[+] suyash|13 years ago|reply
@Author: Thanks buddy, I didn't find anything for myself but some of my family members need to collect their check :)