tedster - 4:40 am on Aug 21, 2000 (gmt 0)

I recently noticed that the bottom of each search return page on AltaVista has this linked acknowledgement: "Linguistic programming by Teragram Corporation"

Alta is giving them a lot of impressions by doing this, so I figure they are making some significant contribution and I started poking around a bit. Teragram is a Boston, MA company specializing in computational linguistics, and one of the favored varieties of computational linguistics today called "optimality theory".

Now I don't know what effect Teragram's work has on the AltaVista search results, but I do know that optimality theory could account for some odd things. It could weight one search term in a query as being more important or meaningful than another. So, searching on A +B might be highly weighted toward A, whereas searching on A +C might be highly weighted toward C.

I realize my post here might be about nothing at all, but when I notice that much favor being given at a high corporate level, I get curious. I did manage to discover that Teragram helped AV develop their "Discovery" product in 1998, so they've been partnering for a while.