I joined Ancestry.com as a developer in June 2002 – exactly 11 years ago – just as Ancestry.com was inventing the family tree technology that differentiates us today. The last 11 years have flown by as our team innovates against the constant challenge of improving our unique and dedicated community’s experience. Looking back over that decade-plus-one, I’m amazed at how much has changed in the technology industry, and pleased we’ve been able to adopt and leverage those changes to accelerate our core mission.
When I joined the company in 2002, the first iPhone wasn’t even in development, “android” was a science-fiction term for a form of humanoid robot, Google was working on its first-generation of search tools and Mark Zuckerberg had just graduated from high school. Hadoop was simply the name of Doug Cutting’s son’s stuffed elephant, and clouds were cirrus, nimbus, and cumulonimbus.
Eleven years ago, Ancestry.com had 200,000 subscribers, historical records numbering in the thousands and 40 developers. Today we have 2.7 million subscribers, 11 billion records and images (4 petabytes of data), and our developer corps has grown 10 fold, to about 400. In 2002, our search capability we were using was AltaVista. Now, thanks to our innovative vertical search technology customized for our business, our servers handle 40 million searches every day, and our technology-driven ‘hints’ are generating an impressive 60 percent of user discoveries. Back then, all customers used our software on desktops.
Change in the tech world has fueled change at Ancestry.com. This has always been a technology company, first and foremost. Last year we launched a new direct-to-consumer DNA test, AncestryDNA, that’s caught on fast and is helping subscribers build out and understand their family trees. AncestryDNA is generating exponential amounts of data that we’re managing with Hadoop, MapReduce and Hive. We’re also exploring narrative technologies to give users another way to turn their family history into compelling stories, and photo recognition software to identify similar facial characteristics of ancestors and thus help users find more family matches. We’re always on the lookout for great engineering talent, and have hired gifted data scientists who are using Natural Language Processing, machine learning predictive analytics to understand future user behavior and enable us to make smarter business decisions. Our teams also innovate in the way we scale and manage our systems to be more robust.
What hasn’t changed since I joined Ancestry.com is our commitment to put the latest technology advances into the hands of the world’s best engineers to improve our customers’ total experience. Eleven years have gone by in a blink, since I’ve been fortunate to experience some amazing challenges and solutions we’ve developed in that time. And I can’t wait to see what interesting problems we’ll be handling in the next 11 years, in the technology industry as a whole and right here at Ancestry.com as we grow our exceptional team to serve the expanding global audience for family history research. It’s been a great ride so far, and it feels like we’re just getting started.