I went to college at MIT in electrical engineering, and went to graduate school at Stanford. I left Stanford with a master’s in computer science after not finishing my PhD thesis. I worked for a number of computer companies, finally leaving AT&T about 10 years ago to do consulting. I also had dreams of starting an internet-based company but could not figure out what product to sell.

That changed when I read a PhD thesis from Cornell about representing documents as “bags of words” and applying some sophisticated math (singular value decomposition) to help with information retrieval.

Before that, the usual way was to enter a search word and see what documents contained that word. However, if someone wrote a document about “automobiles” and you searched on “cars” you were out of luck. With this new method, as long as the document contains many words associated with “cars”, it would match, even if it did not contain the exact word “cars”.

This thesis inspired me to write iMetaSearch, a meta search tool that uses a refined version of this method to help organize results, which you can check out at www.puffinwarellc.com.