The power of our Grapeshot technology comes from the fact that we have Dr. Martin Porter as our founder and Chief Scientist in the development of our code.

The Porter Stemmer
Dr. Porter is the creator of the Porter Stemmer, a compact set of algorithms that make searching for words easier. The Porter Stemmer is used by IBM, Google, and Microsoft and Dr. Porter's work is taught in almost every Computer Science graduate course around the world.

If you want to get a true handle on the importance of his work - look up "Porter Stemmer" on Google. Click here to search "Porter Stemmer"

Grapeshot has been created from the fruits of 30 years work originated at Cambridge University's Computer Science faculty during which search, as we know and understand it today, has truly been shaped by Dr. Porter and his colleagues' work.

Dr. Martin Porter has devoted much of his working life to the implementation of Information Retrieval (IR) systems, in particular, Information Retrieval 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, who became the eminence grise of Information Retrieval in Britain. He has worked with professors C.J. van Rijsbergen and Stephen.E. Robertson, both leading theoreticians in Information Retrieval research.

In 1992 Dr. Martin Porter 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, where they helped to build a large search index of the internet in 1999 which was 60% larger than Alta-Vista at that time.

Dr. Martin Porter is especially well known for his work on stemming algorithms, where he has been able to combine his interests in software, Information Retrieval 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 Information Retrieval research.

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