History

Grapeshot was co-founded in 2002 by Martin Porter and John Snyder, after building the Muscat business from 1992. Both are pioneers in Internet Search and Enterprise Search applications, having delivered solutions to corporations worldwide during the 1990's.

Martin Porter is author of the Porter Stemmer algorithm which is used by search engine companies the world over – including Microsoft, IBM and Google (who approached Grapeshot in November 2004).

Muscat Software

The Grapeshot founders developed Muscat web & intranet search software from 1992 for a broad range of commercial customers….

Porter had started to write the Muscat software in the 1980’s in the BCPL language, actually invented in Cambridge as a pre-runner to C, although obscure today.

John Snyder helped to commercialise Porter’s Muscat search technology from 1992, doubling revenues year on year, and accumulating over 100 corporate customers including BBC, Shell, GEC Marconi, Telegraph, Reuters, Nokia, UK Government and NASA who all used the Muscat search for mission critical internet and intranet search systems. Muscat powered the BBC search pages for five years without a single technical hitch, and provided the main 24/7 archiving system for Reuters.

Muscat software is today owned by APR Smartlogik. Customers such as Yell.com continue to use Porter’s BCPL software to power millions of searches, effortlessly.

WebTop Global Index

Porter and Snyder sold the Muscat business for $15m to Dialog Corporation in 1997, but continued to work on new projects including a 500 million document index of the Internet in 1999. Twice the size of Alta-Vista at that time, their new "WebTop" search service innovated with copy & paste search methods as well as speech enabled search.

Grapeshot

Grapeshot was created from a clean slate, coded in C, drawing on all the founders' experiences of delivering enterprise search systems and multi-million document indexes of the Internet. Grapeshot Limited was incorporated in 2002, and remains a privately held business. The Grapeshot software platform took four years to build, and commercial sales started in late 2005.

Grapeshot is Porter's latest and fifth Information Retrieval (IR) system. Grapeshot uses proprietary probabilistic information retrieval methods developed by Porter in addition to the mainstream academic work that his Cambridge peers, Stephen Robertson and Karen Spark Jones, have pioneered. Grapeshot has a new ranking procedure with more speed and design elegance than previous IR systems built by Porter. We call it "WordRank".

The Grapeshot SDK is a software toolkit designed specifically for OEM use with a comprehensive API for delivering Intelligent Search Architecture inside your own application. Built for a distributed, networked architecture, Grapeshot is small, robust and XML-based. It is sold as the Intelligent Search Architecture Toolkit – iSA Toolkit.

• Grapeshot's new Intelligence Search Architecture (iSA)

Grapeshot DNA is a webservice application built out from the iSA Toolkit that uses the advanced implicit search technologies to read the context of documents and build real-time profiles of users to target better online advertisements or content recommendations.

• Grapeshot's Document DNA
• Grapeshot's Personal DNA