"if you don’t make it clear what you are looking for, you aren’t really testing their technical competence, you’re testing their ability to guess the answer you’re looking for"
^ +1
Google stopped doing this for a reason. Give people real problems to solve, then dive deep on their answer. Unless you're interviewing for an algorist, this is a waste of everyone's time.
Why would we want to return to "the late XIX's century" [sic]? The pain of the Civil War and the invention of cattle drives are tough to connect to the birth of the Internet.
Stalin, in particular, has been a fascination of mine. Anyone interested in learning how a man can literally seize control of the thoughts of millions of people - utterly - in an age when the radio was considered cutting-edge technology should read "Who Killed Kirov?" (http://amzn.to/1moOVmE) That book haunts me.