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Dr. Selberg is one of the founding members of Microsoft Search Labs. Search Labs is a research and development group within the Windows Live Search team. Its mission is to invent, build, and deploy differentiated products and services for Windows Live, leading to new business opportunities and thought leadership for Microsoft in the Internet space. He has a proven track record in developing and operating large-scale Internet search systems, integrated Internet applications, and hosted services. He created the MetaCrawler search service, now part of InfoSpace and still one of the top meta-search services available. He is currently working at Microsoft Corporation, leading a team responsible for the algorithmic relevance of MSN Search and Live Search. Dr. Selberg is well published and holds two patents. He is focused on the business of technology, creating profitable technology products and services that have a profound impact on a large number of people.
Search, information retrieval, collaborative systems, large scale systems, retrieval and scalability issues of the World Wide Web, security and cryptography, audio and video systems.
| Senior Software Development Engineer, Search
Labs
| |
| Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA | June 2006 - present |
As a senior software development engineer, I am one of the founding members of Microsoft Search Labs, Search Labs is a research and development group within the Windows Live Search team. Its mission is to invent, build, and deploy differentiated products and services for Windows Live, leading to new business opportunities and thought leadership for Microsoft in the Internet space.
The project I am working on has not been publicly disclosed, and thus I am unable to comment on it at this time.
| Senior Program Manager, Web Search Algorithmic Relevance
| |
| Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA | Feb. 2003 - June 2006 |
As the program manager for Web Search Algorithmic Relevance, part of the Windows Live Search (formerly MSN Search) group at Microsoft, I drove a cross-group team of developers, testers, and researchers to create the best world-wide algorithmic search engine. My primary focus was core relevance of Web search results. Key to this endeavor was leveraging Microsoft's strong researcher community, not just in MSR - Redmond but also MSR-SVC in Mountain View, MSRC in Cambridge, UK, and MSRA in Beijing, China. The collaboration I drove has been extremely successful - code and algorithms have been integrated from every lab into MSN Search. This helped turn the Search group into a model of how to effectively partner with MSR throughout Microsoft. The MSN Search Engine was built from the ground up and has continued to improve to the point where it is very close in relevance to both Yahoo! and Google, both of whom have had several years head start on their projects.
| Development Manager, Content Discovery
Systems
| |
| RealNetworks, Inc. Seattle, WA | Aug. 2001 - Feb. 2003 |
As the Development Manager for the Content Discovery Systems Group of RealNetworks, I oversaw the development, maintenance, and operations of nearly a dozen system platforms for the Real Subscription Platform. One of my primary responsibilities was ensuring the proper development and operation of the Real Media Authorization Services, mission-critical components of the Real service that ensured subscribers were able to access content they were entitled to and that non-subscribers were denied and presented with the appropriate upsell or error message. I also managed the Real Content Management Services, which included the Real Search Service. These services enabled various vendors and internal editors to provide content for the various Real subscriptions as well as enabled various front-end teams in the company, including external localization groups, to provide customers with the ability to discover and play various pieces of content. Two of the primary systems under my direct supervision were the Radio Service, which powered the various Radio offerings of Real, and the Album Information Service, which is automatically used by every user of the RealPlayer to provide information to that user about the media they are playing, such as album, artist, and track information. These two services are the most commonly used services of people using the RealPlayer.
| Startup Consultant
| |
| Various Engagements | 1996, 1999, 2000 |
As a startup consultant, I aided various startup companies with early stage business and technical development. I helped draft and edit business plans and patent applications. I aided the development of initial prototypes and demos. I was also instrumental in facilitating initial and secondary meetings with local VCs and angel funds, such as Madrona Venture Capital and Arch Venture Partners.
My first engagement was with Netbot Inc., a Seattle-based startup, that licensed MetaCrawler from my research group at the University of Washington. Over the summer of 1996, I worked with Netbot to transfer the MetaCrawler technology and initiate the groundwork for Netbot to host a commercial MetaCrawler service, which would be able to handle upwards of 10 million queries per day at launch. In addition, I was responsible for initial negotiations with the Web search services for commercial use of MetaCrawler with their services, and was heavily involved with the conception of the business plan for the commercial MetaCrawler service.
Shortly after I completed my work at Netbot, it was acquired by Excite Inc. for $35 million dollars for its Jango software product, a comparison shopping agent that used the MetaCrawler engine. Excite was later acquired by Home, Inc. in spring of 1999 for $7 billion dollars.
| Directory of Technology
| |
| FizzyLab, Inc. Seattle, WA | July, 2000 - Jan., 2001 |
FizzyLab was a contextual advertising and search company. Its primary product, Content Relevator, provided a "More articles like this" for several online media providers, such as BusinessWeek and People, and its secondary product, Commerce Relevator, provided relevant advertising links. Among other initial customers were Time Magazine. FizzyLab ran on a Java / Solaris / Oracle platform.
As the Director of Technology for FizzyLab, I led a team of 20 people responsible for the design, implementation, and maintenance of the four primary FizzyLab services and various infrastructure components. I was also responsible for both strategic planning as well as tactical implementation of the technology group for the company. I was involved with forming company strategy as it pertains to both existing and developing technologies, assessing the technical challenges of various market opportunities, evaluating third party technology, and evaluating business opportunities that arise from FizzyLab's Advanced Technology Group. With the other company Directors, I created a company-wide tactical road maps on a quarterly basis. I then executed against the company road map, ensuring that initiatives were properly scoped and staffed, teams were engaged, and engineering work was properly scheduled. My managerial responsibilities included creating project and technology teams, giving direction to team leads and members, hiring and firing, setting individual goals, and developing and executing development processes.
| Director of Search
| |
| Go2Net, Inc., Seattle, WA | June, 1999 - June, 2000 |
Go2Net was a diversified Internet company with products in four main areas: Web search, small business hosting, financial message boards, and online games, with emerging initiatives in broadband properties. The Search group was responsible for the development, maintenance, and operations of MetaCrawler, DogPile, and 100hot. In July of 2000, both MetaCrawler and DogPile were each handling over 2 million queries per day on about 20 lower-end Linux boxes.
As the Director of Search for Go2Net, I lead a team that managed the daily operation and enhancement of MetaCrawler, DogPile, and 100hot, which were responsible for generating several million dollars of revenue per quarter. I helped form the product strategies, created the schedule, and assessed third-party technologies for acquisition or partnerships. On the technology side, I created and implemented the development, build, and release processes, developed the high level architectures of the system, scheduled resources, and oversaw the hiring of the engineering team.
| Research Assistant
| |
| University of Washington, Seattle, WA | September, 1993 - June, 1999 |
While attaining my doctorate degree at the UW, I created the MetaCrawler parallel search engine with my advisor, Prof. Oren Etzioni. I wrote all the code and handled all the administration of MetaCrawler for over a year. I was responsible for ensuring MetaCrawler remained fast and responsive as the number of users grew, given limited hardware resources - four DEC Alphas. I developed many software optimizations and automated server administration tools towards this effort. Before MetaCrawler was licensed in 1996, it was handling almost 100,000 queries per day with room to grow, which was roughly 3-5 times as many as its closest competitor, SavvySearch.
While investigating the overlap of search engine results, I observed that experiments that used search results as data were very unstable. This led to my work on empirical evaluation of major search engines. This evaluation measured how rapidly the results of a query change over time, as well as how different the results of a query are when the query is submitted with different query options. These findings concluded that the results of Web search engines change extremely rapidly, even when given the same query.
| Research Intern
| |
| AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ | Summer, 1994 |
At AT&T Bell Laboratories, I worked with Bart Selman and Henry Kautz on the Bots project. The Bots project was an exploration into creating personal assistant software agents that would communicate with one another to accomplish various tasks, such as meeting scheduling, expertise referral, and e-mail prioritizing. My tasks were to re-write the Bots in a more manageable way as well as to create a Bot communications protocol so that Bots could effectively transfer information between themselves.
| Research Intern
| |
| Pittsburgh Science Center, Pittsburgh, PA | Summer, 1993 |
I was a research intern at the Pittsburgh Science Center, working with Prof. Adam Beguelin on the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) project, which simulated a distributed memory multiprocesser by using a network of workstations. I designed a monitoring and debugging tool for applications using PVM as well as designed and integrated a Kerberos-based authorization system for PVM applications.
Ph.D., Computer Science and Engineering June, 1999
University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
M.S., Computer Science and Engineering June, 1995
University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
B.S., Mathematics / Computer Science and Logic & Computation
May, 1993
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
The C
Net Awards for Internet Excellence, 1995
MetaCrawler was one of three finalists for the Best Internet Search Engine.
Allen Newell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, 1993
| University of Washington, Seattle, WA
| |
| Winter - Spring, 1994 |
|
Thesis
``Towards Comprehensive Web Search.'' Erik Selberg. Ph. D. Thesis, University of Washington, June, 1999.
Fully Refereed Papers
``On the Instability of Web Search.'' Erik Selberg and Oren Etzioni. In RIAO '00: Content-based Multimedia Access, Apr., 1999.
``Multi-Service Search and Comparison using the MetaCrawler.'' Erik Selberg and Oren Etzioni. In Proceedings of the 4th International World Wide Web Conference, Dec., 1995.
``TRON: Process-Specific File Protection for the UNIX Operating System.'' Andrew Berman, Virgil Bourassa, and Erik Selberg. In Proceedings of the 1995 Winter USENIX Conference, Jan., 1995.
Invited Papers
``The MetaCrawler Architecture for Resource Aggregation on the Web.'' IEEE Expert, Jan. / Feb. 1997, 12(1).
Technical Reports
``Experiments with Collaborative Index Enhancement.'' Erik Selberg and Oren Etzioni. University of Washington Tech Report UW-CSE-98-06-01, June 1998.
``How to Stop a Cheater: Secret Sharing with Dishonest Participants.'' Erik Selberg. Carnegie Mellon University Tech Report CMU-CS-93-182, June 1993.
Dr. Selberg holds two patents covering a method and system wrappers to execute a query on a network:
| 6,102,969 | Method and system using information written in a |
| wrapper description language to execute query on a network | |
| 6,085,186 | Method and system using information written in a |
| wrapper description language to execute query on a network |
As part of the undergraduate honors program, Undergraduate seniors complete a senior project where they work closely with graduate students and professors.
| Christin Boyd
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| Winter and Spring 1996 |
|
| Darren Schack
| |
| Summer 1996 |
|
| Tim Bradley
| |
| Fall 1995 and Winter 1996 |
|
| Decade of the Web Symposium, University of Iowa
| |
| March, 1999 |
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| IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
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| Oct. 1998 | /B> |
| Boeing Corp.
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| May 1998 |
|
| Data Mining Summit
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| Mar. 1997 |
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| Distributed Indexing and Searching Workshop
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| May 1996 | /B> |
| IETF Group Meeting
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| June 1996 |
|
HuskySearch. HuskySearch is a second generation meta search service available at the University of Washington. HuskySearch is the primary search service available for searching the University of Washington and is an ongoing research testbed for World Wide Web IR. HuskySearch is available at http://huskysearch.cs.washington.edu.
MetaCrawler. MetaCrawler is one of the original World Wide Web
meta search services. Its early popularity was instrumental in the
formation of Netbot, Inc., a startup company founded at the University
of Washington and acquired by Excite, Inc. for $35
million. MetaCrawler has since been licensed to Go2Net Inc., a Seattle
start-up, and is one of the premiere sites on the Go2Net Network. The
Go2Net Network was
ranked #25 by Media Metrics in terms of overall web
traffic in January 1999. MetaCrawler is available at
http://www.metacrawler.com.
Graduate Student Orientation Committee, 1994-1995: Supervised orientation presentation for new graduate students in the CSE Department.
Tom Haug tom.haug@pacificedge.com
Pacific Edge Software, Inc.
Steve Newman steve.newman@infospace.com
InfoSpace, Inc.
Chek Lim chek.lim@infospace.com
InfoSpace, Inc.
Professor Oren Etzioni etzioni@cs.washington.edu
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Professor Ed Lazowska lazowska@cs.washington.edu
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Professor Efthimis Efthimiadis efthimis@u.washington.edu
Information School, University of Washington