A big brain goes to Yahoo. The release is here. From it:
Broder was a Distinguished Engineer and the CTO of the Institute for Search and Text Analysis at IBM Research. Prior to this he was vice president for research and chief scientist at the AltaVista Company, reporting directly to the CEO. He was also a senior member of the research staff at Compaq’s Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. He graduated summa cum laude from Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, and obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University under Don Knuth.
Broder has done a lot of work in the past decade or so on search and IR, I’ve read many of his papers for the book, and as I recall he has done some work with folks now at Google.
Gary has some of Broder’s greatest hits listed here.
Broder was the chief scientist at AltaVista from 1999 into early 2002.
This is an important footnote because AltaVista was the choice among professional Searchers because of its relatively huge database (for that time) although there was a lot of Spam – you would eventually find almost everything you needed. One interesting factor in its’ Algos was the AGE of a site -the older the better, helping it tremdously in the SERPs
Around 2001 there was a sudden sharp decrease in relevancy, although there were less spam sites to search through.
What is of grave concern is HOW did the “Google” of its day be allowed to atrophy to what is now a Yahoo afterthought?
Here is an archived chapter about AltaVista History
http://web.archive.org/web/19980210160743/www.altavista.digital.com/av/content/about_our_story.htm
Yahoo is extending an invitation for its users to ask Search Releated questions of Dr. Andrei Broder
The Answers will be posted on the Blog.
The above concern was just posted on their Blog…
Lets see if that Mystey will be solved.
ysearchblog.com/archives/000241.html
What is of grave concern is HOW did the “Google” of its day be allowed to atrophy to what is now a Yahoo afterthought?
Read Johns book, it was the business idiots that didn’t understand what people wanted from search, and lack of investment in actual search that killed it. I watched it happen, it was a sad and telling time, and in reality they were dead in the water before Google started reaching critical mass, so Google really benefited from the disenchanted AltaVista user base migration.
Just Read this answer…
ysearchblog.com/archives/000264.html