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).

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

Dr. Martin 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 Dr. 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.

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.

Almost 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. It experimented with capturing the behavioural interests of users by mining the keywords in the text over which users did a WebCheck search. Instead of users typing keywords as an explicit search, WebCheck took the text of an email or Word document and delivered implicit search results back from the Internet.

Several people who worked at WebTop together ten years ago, now work together again in the Grapeshot team today.

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 Information Retrieval systems built by Porter. We call it "WordRank".

Since 2005 the Grapeshot development team has developed a C++ web service environment to wrap around the calls in and out of the Grapeshot sub-system initially developed by Dr. Porter.

The Grapeshot webservice features a broad set of components which can crawl URLs, ingest RSS feeds, find related documents in milliseconds, and perform real-time categorisation on keywords captured in web pages and keyword-based user profiles.

Whilst the first Grapeshot customers were signed up in 2005, a full advertising solution was first delivered in August 2006. Deployments have now been made across the 9 Grapeshot Targeting product offerings to a variety of customers in US, UK and European markets.

The ability to process a large number of keywords as a multiple word query, into a large Grapeshot index of content or user profiles, to provide a relevant match between pages, user profiles, advertisements and channel category definitions, all in milliseconds, is some of the "magic" we expect to bring to the online advertising sector.