have you heard about this grad student search algorithm that elgoog purchased? the press talks a lot about phd student ori allon, but makes zero mention of eric martin - the co-inventor who was also the advisor on ori’s thesis….not even in the schools own announcement from last fall is there any real detail… so naturally, i decided to try to fill in some holes for those of you looking at this particular item for ANY reason - all in the name of wasting time! you wanna know why? because i was so annoyed that several of the pages associated with this transaction have gone down, and the information slightly obfuscated…that’s annoying shit, so just knock it off whoever you are..

btw, in light of selling out, check out this old quote from allon - before he learned that money talks - “Orion will complement existing search engines like Yahoo, MSN or Google. This engine will help weed out pages that are less important to searches and will help search engines improve relevancy, which is always needing refinement anyway.”

0…but before i even get started, do keep in mind that there is already traction in this space - and orion (ori allon’s algorithm and concept that none of us can use) is similar in spirit to qtsaver (i was totally sucked into the blog behind this engine btw) …okay, yeah, read more about all of this orion discussion in detail if you want http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/orion-ori-allon.html, and then tell me if you get a kick out of this very interesting new micro-content search engine called qtsaver (extracts micro-content from existing search engines, so perhaps similar in spirit? or is this a leap of faith or a wicked stretch of the imagination when comparing these?) …or did other search engines conceive of this a long, long time ago?

…or instead of just qtsaver, check out surfnotes (a patent pending algorithm though, not issued)…or check out the concept from q-phrase (”ConceptQ works in conjunction with Google, MSN, Wikipedia and other major search engines.”)…the dude from qtsaver turned me on to both of those btw, so do keep an eye on his blog!

at any rate, so i’m looking for info on ori allon - but the old page at unsw went down for me, so i turned to the archive, which turns up this contact info: Ori Allon, PhD Student, Office: K17-412-05, Phone: 61 2 9385 6906 (Internal: x56906), Email: oria AT cse.unsw.edu.au (at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia)

here are some quick notes on ori allon’s thesis: (numbered 1650 with the school) “Using Search Engines for Discovery Information Retrieval” with supervisor Eric Martin (Senior Lecturer & PostGrad Coursework Academic Advisor) and co-supervisor Aleksandar Ignjatovic (aleks was the founder of kromos technology, acquired by comstellar, kromos’ former ceo was raj parekh btw, the old cto of sun - aleks has a few patents already issued in different areas, and a phd from berkeley under jack silver the uber-set-theorist…but he’s not on the patents, eric is…) - so yeah, that thesis supervisor and co-inventor, eric martin, senior lecturer (phd from paris in case you wanna dig up more) - here’s some contact info for him too : Office: K17-409, Phone: 61 2 9385 6936, Fax: 61 2 9385 5995, Email: emartin AT cse.unsw.edu.au (dude’s page seemed to be long gone…)

oh, and those two patents (there were two associated with ori allon and eric martin together under the tech transfer company, not one)…here are the two i found searching pericles on the australian patent database (”patsearch” in their engine list):

    Allon, Ori; Martin, Eric: Newsouth Innovations Pty Ltd, number 2005905853 “Methods and systems for facilitating ranking of an advertisement” from october 2005, and
    Allon, Ori; Martin, Eric: Newsouth Innovations Pty Ltd, number 205906358 “A method and a system for facilitating ranking of textual information” (also late ‘05)

…these patents were sold via newsouth innovations, and they’re kinda interesting - they’re the tech transfer piece of this whole deal with elgoog and unsw…though you won’t find this technology listed on their site, and good luck getting a response back! hah! (they’re at the Rupert Myers Building, Gate 14 Barker Street, UNSW, Sydney NSW 2052, Australia)

(oh, and the agent on those patents in case you wanna dig a bit more: Griffith Hack, Level 29, Northpoint 100 Miller Street North Sydney NSW 2060 Australia)

…so yeah, hopefully this totally unorganized batch of information will help somebody out there and save that person some time digging up information or looking for a trail to follow…honestly, i’m not totally floored by it - of course, since there’s no way to test it out or see what it is, then i suppose we’ll all have to wait to see if it’s gonna be as super-good as googlepages!!

btw, for eric martin, you’re gonna have to go dig around in archive for some older pages…at which point you’ll find several interesting publications (haven’t yet looked to see if any co-authors are already at elgoog, though i’m guessing that they’ve already got a couple of these folks…)…here’s a recent one or two from 2002, “Generalized Logical Consequence: Making Room for Induction in the Logic of Science, Martin EA, Chopra S, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Kluwer Academic Publishers, the Netherlands, 2002, 31, pp245-280…..and 2) Scientific Discovery from the Perspective of Hypothesis Acceptance, Martin EA, Osherson DN, Philosophy of Science, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA, 2002, 69(3)S, ppS331-S341…and 3) Learning in Logic with RichProlog, Martin EA, Nguyen P, Sharma A, Stephan F, Logic Programming, Eds. Peter J Stuckey, Copenhagen Denmark, 29-1 Jul. 2002, Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany, pp239-254…go hit his site in archive if you want more than that…

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