Projects and Papers

Projects

MetaCrawler (1995 - )

I am perhaps best known for creating MetaCrawler with my advisor, Oren Etzioni. I was the sole implementor of MetaCrawler and ran it at the University of Washington from mid-1995 until the end of 1996. I then transferred the service to NetBot, who in turn licensed it to Go2Net in January 1997. After completing my doctorate in '99, I followed Oren to Go2Net as Director of Search and spent a year working on MetaCrawler and other search projects, including DogPile, a competitor to MetaCrawler acquired by Go2Net. Oren and I both left Go2Net after a year; as it turned out, this was just before they were acquired by InfoSpace, who currently operate MetaCrawler.

 

SpeedStats (1997 - 1999)

A side project for amusement, I created SpeedStats, a quick Perl-based statistics program for Team Fortress, a Quake (well, QuakeWorld, really) mod. The challenge in this program was in enabling rather complex log parsing that translated single-line English text into the corresponding stats in a speedy manner.

 

HuskySearch (1997 - 2000)

After transferring MetaCrawler to NetBot, I re-christened his copy of MetaCrawler as HuskySearch, the next generation of parallel Web search service. In particular, I and other students at the University of Washington used HuskySearch as a research testbed for several projects, such as Collaborative Index Enhancement, which I did, and Short-Text Phrase Clustering, by Dr. Oren Zamir.

 

590i Randoms (1995 - 1997)

I was one of the organizers of 590i, a seminar on the Internet and Things. Some amazing things came out of that seminar, including the original WebCrawler by Brian Pinkerton, as well as my old "Cool Links" page which still gets a lot of hits from people simply due to its early inception

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Bots (1994)

During the summer of 1994, I had an internship at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, working on the Software Agents project with Bart Selman and Henry Kautz.

TRON (1993)

Along with Andy Berman and Virgil Bourassa, I created TRON: Process-Specifc File Protection for UNIX, presented at Winter 1995 USENIX. For more information on TRON, check out the TRON home page.