Grapeshot Founders

The Grapeshot founders, Martin Porter and John Snyder, have worked together since 1992, producing commercial search systems at the leading edge of innovation. Grapeshot is the latest, and greatest, output of their long collaboration.

Dr Martin Porter

Dr Martin Porter, 64, has devoted much of his working life to the implementation of Information Retrieval (IR) systems, in particular, IR systems based on the probabilistic model. Grapeshot is the fifth significant search system he has written.

He studied at Cambridge University in England, where, after achieving a distinction in the Diploma in Computer Science, he took a PhD, supervised by Karen Sparck Jones, now the eminence grise of IR in Britain. He has worked with professors C.J. van Rijsbergen and S.E. Robertson, both leading theoreticians in IR research.

In 1992 Martin set up the Muscat Limited company with John Snyder, to commercialise his Muscat software, which they grew and sold as a profitable and fast growth business in 1997. Both continued to work for The Dialog Corporation, the acquiring company, until 2001 when they both resigned on the same day.

Martin Porter is especially well known for his work on stemming algorithms, where he has been able to combine his interests in software, IR and linguistics. Porter's original stemming algorithm for English, "An algorithm for suffix stripping" (Program, 14(3), 130-137), has become one of the most frequently cited papers in IR research.

In 2000, Martin Porter won the Strix Award, "for outstanding contribution to the field of information retrieval".

John Snyder

John Snyder, aged 42, is one of many entrepreneurs in the high-tech cluster around Cambridge who commercialised technology originally researched within Cambridge University.

In 1992 he teamed up with Martin Porter and started Muscat, the natural language search software company, which commercialised "concept-based" searching prior to the advent of other Bayesian-based search providers. John built up the a strong customer base of international corporations over a five year period, before negotiating the sale of Muscat in 1997 to The Dialog Corporation, the large aggregator of online business information.

In 1999 John took a small team of three engineers and built a 300 million document index of the internet in just 12 weeks on a small cluster of Linux machines, launching it as the WebTop subsidiary of The Dialog Corporation. Through 2000, he grew the WebTop team to 40 plus staff and the internet index to 500 million documents, drawing on new ideas of P2P (peer-to-peer) networks. In 2001 he "retired" to Cambridge University as Director of Business Creation.

John has since been co-founder and founder investor in Library House, a buy-side research house that offers its corporate and venture capitalist members a research facility for the technology investment community. He is also a Cambridge Angels business angel and has invested privately in local technology companies.

John serves as a Board member of the East of England Development Agency and continues to be "Entrepreneur In Residence" at Cambridge University.

Grapeshot's founders have lifetime experience in building Information Retrieval systems and servicing the commercial needs of many different customers.