If you have searched for, and successfully found, something on the internet over the past couple of months, you should say a little thank you to Ori Allon. The 29-year-old Israeli-born computer whiz is the man responsible for inventing a technique to make web searches far quicker and more efficient, earning himself a fortune in the process.
Allon, who left Israel after army service to study in Australia, is not the stereotypical geek one expects of a computer scientist. He sports a healthy mop of semi-styled hair, some stubble, blue jeans and a semi-crumpled shirt. He smiles as he relives how internet giants Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft threw money waged a bidding war to acquire
the rights to his revolutionary invention.
It was late 2005 and the doctoral student at University of New South Wales in Sydney had just come up with a complex algorithm for internet search engines that could understand the meaning behind internet queries as opposed to simply identifying individual words. Within weeks he was in Silicon Valley in California meeting a team of technical engineers at Google.
“We don’t try to match keywords,” explains Allon. “We try to understand the meaning behind the query and find the good web pages that correspond to it.”
Word of Orion — as the algorithm became known — spread quickly and Allon soon received a phone call from Yahoo! asking him to drop by their Californian headquarters to demonstrate the technology. And then came a call from Microsoft. Within days he was on a flight to Seattle to talk to Bill Gates’s minions. “I didn’t think these people would get that excited about it,” Allon says. “But they tried all these different queries that didn’t work well on their search engines, and they worked really well on Orion.”
As a test, the secret recipe for Coca-Cola was typed into Orion and the conventional search engines, he recalls. “I got what people speculate is the actual recipe as the first result on Orion. They got some random websites.”
A bidding war began between the three companies for the exclusive rights to Orion. Google won the war, buying the rights for an undisclosed sum — and luring Allon into the bargain. “They usually don’t buy these kinds of things. They usually buy well-established companies like YouTube,” he says.
Allon has now worked for the last three years at the world’s largest internet company, where staff are lavished with free food, games rooms, and other luxuries.
“It’s not why people come to work at Google,” he insists. “The fact you can affect so many people… is something that gives you a huge amount of satisfaction,” noting also that his parents are “very proud of me”.
He offers the example of the Six-Day War, which is a straightforward search on the internet. But asking who are the most important figures in the Six-Day War is a much more complex search.
The key to Orion, he says, is that it will understand the meaning behind the question as opposed to the individual keywords. It will thus return websites related to Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin and Uzi Narkis, among others. And it will do so “in a matter of milliseconds” for the “many millions of queries” Google receives every hour — in 37 languages — since Orion was launched on March 24.
Asked about the zeroes that have been added to his bank balance, Allon laughs nervously. “The uni did very well and I did very well,” he says diplomatically. “I knew early on I wanted to make a difference — not just to work and make money. It’s a good feeling, but it’s a better feeling to know I can really improve people’s lives when they actually need information.”
