Kaltix

Last updated
Kaltix Corporation
Company type Subsidiary
Industry Internet, search engine
FoundedJune 16, 2003;21 years ago (2003-06-16), in Palo Alto, California, U.S.
FounderTaher Haveliwala, Glen Jeh, Sepandar "Sep" Kamvar
FateAcquired by Google
Key people
Sep Kamvar (CEO)
Parent Google

Kaltix Corporation [1] was a personalized search engine company founded at Stanford University in June 2003 by Sepandar Kamvar, Taher Haveliwala and Glen Jeh. [2] [3] [4] It was acquired by Google in September 2003. [5] [6] [7]

Contents

Description

Kaltix was a startup company that was formed to commercialize personalized web search technology [4] by utilizing a set of proprietary algorithms. The company had developed a system to speed up the computation of Google's PageRank algorithm and personalize search results by sorting them according to the interests of the individual instead of the consensus approach developed by Google. [8] [9] It was claimed by the founders of the company that the algorithm offered a way to compute search results nearly 1,000 times faster than what was possible using current methods in 2003. [8] [10] [11]

History

Kaltix was based on the work of Sep Kamvar, Taher Haveliwala and Glen Jeh, who were alumni from Stanford University and participants of their alma mater's PageRank Project as graduate students from 2002 to 2003. [3] [12] [13] The project's aim was to advance the PageRank algorithm, developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google. [3] [4] Their collective efforts resulted in the development of three algorithms: Quadratic Extrapolation, BlackRock and Adaptive PageRank. [14] [15] [16] Together, the algorithms formed the foundation of Kaltix. [17]

The first algorithm was presented in a paper to the 12th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2003) in Budapest, Hungary on May 22, 2003. [14] [18] [19] Kaltix Corp was later established on June 16, 2003, and the trio published their business plan and purchased the Kaltix domain name the same day. [17] [20] Just three months after the company's founding, on September 30, 2003, Kaltix was acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum. [6]

Reception

Kaltix was initially met with excitement and mystery by both technology writers (including The New York Times ) and the technology industry as a whole. [7] [21] Enthusiasm for the potential of personalized search results obtained up to five times faster than Google was accompanied by speculation due to the lack of public information about the company at the time. [3] [22] [23] [24] [25] Since its founding and acquisition by Google, Kaltix has been noted for its significance due to its impact towards the development of personalized search. [26] [27] [28] [29] [30]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Search</span> Search engine from Google

Google Search is a search engine operated by Google. It allows users to search for information on the Web by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. It is the most popular search engine worldwide.

In computing, a search engine is an information retrieval software system designed to help find information stored on one or more computer systems. Search engines discover, crawl, transform, and store information for retrieval and presentation in response to user queries. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. The most widely used type of search engine is a web search engine, which searches for information on the World Wide Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larry Page</span> American computer scientist and businessman (born 1973)

Lawrence Edward Page is an American businessman, computer engineer & computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sergey Brin</span> American computer scientist and businessman (born 1973)

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin is an American computer scientist and businessman who co-founded Google with Larry Page. He was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on December 3, 2019. He and Page remain at Alphabet as co-founders, controlling shareholders and board members. As of October 2024, Brin is the 7th-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $147 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Hsiang-Tsung Kung is a Taiwanese-born American computer scientist. He is the William H. Gates professor of computer science at Harvard University. His early research in parallel computing produced the systolic array in 1979, which has since become a core computational component of hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence, including Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). Similarly, he proposed optimistic concurrency control in 1981, now a key principle in memory and database transaction systems, including MySQL, Apache CouchDB, Google's App Engine, and Ruby on Rails. He remains an active researcher, with ongoing contributions to computational complexity theory, hardware design, parallel computing, routing, wireless communication, signal processing, and artificial intelligence.

Krishna Bharat is an Indian research scientist at Google Inc. He was formerly a founding adviser for Grokstyle Inc. a visual search company and Laserlike Inc., an interest search engine startup based on Machine Learning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Search engine</span> Software system for finding relevant information on the Web

A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gene H. Golub</span> American mathematician

Gene Howard Golub, was an American numerical analyst who taught at Stanford University as Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and held a courtesy appointment in electrical engineering.

Google Personalized Search is a personalized search feature of Google Search, introduced in 2004. All searches on Google Search are associated with a browser cookie record. When a user performs a search, the search results are not only based on the relevance of each web page to the search term, but also on which websites the user visited through previous search results. This provides a more personalized experience that can increase the relevance of the search results for the particular user. Such filtering may also have side effects, such as the creation of a filter bubble.

Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr. It is an enhanced version of web search that combines traditional algorithms. The idea behind social search is that instead of ranking search results purely based on semantic relevance between a query and the results, a social search system also takes into account social relationships between the results and the searcher. The social relationships could be in various forms. For example, in LinkedIn people search engine, the social relationships include social connections between searcher and each result, whether or not they are in the same industries, work for the same companies, belong the same social groups, and go the same schools, etc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sepandar Kamvar</span> Iranian computer scientist

Sepandar David Kamvar, also known as Sep Kamvar, is a computer scientist, artist, author and entrepreneur. He is a cofounder of Mosaic, an AI-powered construction company, Celo, a cryptocurrency protocol, and Wildflower Schools, a decentralized network of Montessori microschools. He was previously a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and LG Career Development Chair at MIT, and director of the Social Computing group at the MIT Media Lab. He left MIT in 2016.

GenieKnows Inc. was a privately owned vertical search engine company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was started by Rami Hamodah who also started SwiftlyLabs.com and Salesboom.com. Like many internet search engines, its revenue model centers on an online advertising platform and B2B transactions. It focuses on a set of search markets, or verticals, including health search, video games search, and local business directory search.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rajeev Motwani</span> Indian computer scientist (1962–2009)

Rajeev Motwani was an Indian-American professor of computer science at Stanford University whose research focused on theoretical computer science. He was a special advisor to Sequoia Capital. He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001.

Natural-language user interface is a type of computer human interface where linguistic phenomena such as verbs, phrases and clauses act as UI controls for creating, selecting and modifying data in software applications.

Ranking of query is one of the fundamental problems in information retrieval (IR), the scientific/engineering discipline behind search engines. Given a query q and a collection D of documents that match the query, the problem is to rank, that is, sort, the documents in D according to some criterion so that the "best" results appear early in the result list displayed to the user. Ranking in terms of information retrieval is an important concept in computer science and is used in many different applications such as search engine queries and recommender systems. A majority of search engines use ranking algorithms to provide users with accurate and relevant results.

Search neutrality is a principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance. This means that when a user types in a search engine query, the engine should return the most relevant results found in the provider's domain, without manipulating the order of the results, excluding results, or in any other way manipulating the results to a certain bias.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PageRank</span> Algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages

PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According to Google:

PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.

Personalized search is a web search tailored specifically to an individual's interests by incorporating information about the individual beyond the specific query provided. There are two general approaches to personalizing search results, involving modifying the user's query and re-ranking search results.

The webgraph describes the directed links between pages of the World Wide Web. A graph, in general, consists of several vertices, some pairs connected by edges. In a directed graph, edges are directed lines or arcs. The webgraph is a directed graph, whose vertices correspond to the pages of the WWW, and a directed edge connects page X to page Y if there exists a hyperlink on page X, referring to page Y.

References

  1. ↑ "Kaltix Corporation". OpenCorporates . 2003-01-01. Retrieved 2023-08-07.
  2. ↑ "scientific-contributions".
  3. 1 2 3 4 Olsen, Stefanie. Search for the personal touch. CNET.com. August 11, 2003.
  4. 1 2 3 PageRank Project. pagerank.stanford.edu.
  5. ↑ Olsen, Stefanie. Academia's quest for the ultimate search tool. CNET.com. August 15, 2005.
  6. 1 2 Google Acquires Kaltix Corp. Google. September 30, 2003.
  7. 1 2 Technology Briefing - Internet: Google Buys Web Search Company. New York Times. October 1, 2003.
  8. 1 2 Kaltix to Beat Google? Archived 2008-05-16 at the Wayback Machine . Rank for Sales. August 12, 2003.
  9. ↑ Google Acquires Kaltix. Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. September 30, 2003.
  10. ↑ Chai, Winston. Scientists propose Google speed boost [ permanent dead link ]. ZDNet.com via Google Web Cache. May 27, 2003. Retrieved July 16, 2012.
  11. ↑ Researchers Develop Techniques For Computing Google-style Web Rankings Up To Five Times Faster; Speed-Up May Make 'Topic-Sensitive' Page Rankings Feasible. Science Daily. May 14, 2003.
  12. ↑ PageRank Team Publications. pagerank.stanford.edu.
  13. ↑ Personalized Search Publications List Archived 2012-10-19 at the Wayback Machine . kamvar.org.
  14. 1 2 Kamvar, Sepandar, Taher Haveliwal, Christopher Manning and Gene Golub. Extrapolation Methods for Accelerating PageRank Computations. Stanford InfoLab Publication Server. February 27, 2003. Last Modified December 24, 2008.
  15. ↑ Kamvar, Sepandar, Taher Haveliwal, Christopher Manning and Gene Golub. Exploiting the Block Structure of the Web for Computing PageRank. Stanford InfoLab Publication Server. March 3, 2003. Last Modified December 24, 2008.
  16. ↑ Kamvar, Sepandar, Taher Haveliwal and Gene Golub. Adaptive Methods for the Computation of PageRank. Stanford InfoLab Publication Server. April 27, 2003. Last Modified December 24, 2008.
  17. 1 2 Haveliwala, Taher, Glen Jeh and Sep Kamvar. Kaltix Business Plan [ permanent dead link ]. Stanford FTP Database via Google Cache. June 16, 2003.
  18. ↑ Hart, David. Researchers develop ways to compute faster Google-style web rankings. Stanford Reporter. May 21, 2003.
  19. ↑ WWW 2003 Programme. www2003.org.
  20. ↑ Kaltix Domain Registration Information. networksolutions.com. Retrieved July 15, 2012.
  21. ↑ Mernit, Susan. Kaltix: From spin-out to Google purchase in 45 days. SusanMernit.com. September 30, 2003.
  22. ↑ Sullivan, Danny. The Search Engine Update - Number 155. Search Engine Watch. August 17, 2003.
  23. ↑ Moore, Cathleen. Google grabs search start-up. Inforworld. September 30, 2003.
  24. ↑ Google Acquires Kaltix, Looks to Personalize Search. SEO Logic. September 30, 2003.
  25. ↑ Levene, Mark. An Introduction to Search Engines and Web Navigation. John Wiley & Sons via Google. October 18, 2010.
  26. ↑ Langville, Amy and Carl Meyer. Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings. Princeton University Press via Google, p 51.
  27. ↑ Tyrsina, Radu. What Companies Have Google, Apple and Facebook Bought so Far?. Technically Personal. February 1, 2012.
  28. ↑ Linden, Greg. Personalized Search Primer Archived 2012-05-27 at the Wayback Machine . ReadWriteWeb. August 6, 2007.
  29. ↑ Macmanus, Richard. Interview with Sep Kamvar Archived 2012-08-25 at the Wayback Machine . ReadWriteWeb. August 9, 2007.
  30. ↑ Orlowski, Andrew. Google buys search engine: PageRank RIP?. The Register. September 30, 2003.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.