John Ellis to Lead AV's Advance Into Next Generation Search

A Day Late and a Buck Short?

[seth_wilde]

AV has hired John Ellis to "spearhead" their research and development efforts as well as manage the engineers. It's great that AV is finally bringing in some new talent, but is it too late?

John's Degrees:
Ph.D. & M.S. in Computer Science from Yale University
B.S.E. in Computer Science from Princeton University

(he also holds some patents.. might have and update about that later...)

Past Employers:
Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center
Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre
New Enterprise Associates
Post Communications (co founder)
Open Market

John Says:

The time has come for truly user-centric Internet search technologies that dramatically improve upon the innovation the consumer search sector has seen in the past few years. I am very excited to work with the highly focused and energised team at AltaVista to forge a new path into the future of Internet search technology.

[ffgb.presscentre.co.uk...]

ps... thanks for the heads up RC!

[rcjordan]

>Past Employers:
>Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center
>
I wonder if he was there during AV's glory days?

Dear John,

About Altavista.....

[seth_wilde]

Here's John's Personal Homepage [johnrellis.com]... Has links to some of the white papers he's written as well as some really cool pictures of him skiing :)

Added... His patents are in garbage collection and compiler implementation and are used by Microsoft's Alpha NT systems

(edited by: seth_wilde at 10:47 pm (utc) on Jan. 24, 2002)

[rcjordan]

Well, we'll just have to see if he reads his logs.

<added>
OH NO! The irony...

I hold two patents, one in garbage collection...

[seth_wilde]

Yeah he shouldn't just drop that on you without explaining...:) Otherwise you could assume he's being hired for a very different reason...

Garbage Collection Research [gatekeeper.dec.com]

[rcjordan]

Well, at least he told it like it is... I hate "sanitation" derivatives.

One sharp cookie. And, he has his name as a domain. Another good sign.

[tedster]

We soon learned that push technology was not a killer application for the Internet...

Maybe pop-ups and pop-unders will disappear from AV. We can hope.

[abertone]

Looks like his site is down, or is it just me?

-Andrea

[seth_wilde]

just you :)

[minnapple]

< push technology
I always scratched by head on that one. I thought I was dim witted.

[jeremy goodrich]

that user centric stuff reads to me like they might consider going after personalizing the serps...Google does it with cookies, now we have speculation you have to login even to search at excite.com, and with IBM's announcement about their engine/coupled with their patents...

makes me wonder, are they going to jump into the next generation of search, too? If so, how will they compete? Charge a user fee? Spin AV into a public company (ha ha) and use the funds to develop something really cool?

they do have that nice patent collection they filed for...and perhaps with this new chap, they might finally realize the user is the only one that matters...if you please them, the rest will follow...

Might be really cool if this means AV could surpise us, and make a big come back...the track record, so far, is for an SE to muck up, drop, keep dropping, and become a Goto clone...