Matthew Berk
Yes, no blog. :)
I currently work as Lead Search Architect for Seattle-based Marchex, Inc.
In this role, I drive our R&D efforts in search technology;
I also help guide the deployment of Open List search technology across our network of 200,000+ Web sites.
Today, the Open List engine provides over a billion pages of unique local content and search to over 150,000 Web sites, covering
a corpus of more than 16 million US businesses.
From late 2003 until our acquisition by Marchex in the spring of 2006,
I was a co-founder and CTO of Open List, Inc., a vertical search technology company.
Prior to co-founding Open List, I was a Research Director for JupiterResearch, where I focused on Search Technology, Content Management, and Site Technologies and Operations. My work was quoted pretty broadly in the trade and popular press, but since going back to the operational side of the world, I've more or less stopped
talking and focused more exclusively on
doing.
My training in search technology and as an engineer has been entirely self-directed and practical.
Although I have been programming since the late seventies, my formal training is instead in languages and literature.
I have a bachelor's degree in English and Comparative Literature from Cornell, and a master's in English Literature from
The Johns Hopkins University, where I was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities.
It was only after leaving graduate school in the mid 90's and working first as a Web master, then as a VP Technology, and
eventually as a CTO that I came full circle to my love of programming.
I've been working in "the field" and keeping the faith since 1995,
when I played hookey from reading Donne and Milton and began hosting Web sites in my apartment off a 56K leased line and a Livingston Portmaster. My work/technology interests include IR, IE, and NLP, the burgeoning online opportunity in India, a concept I call the "networked microbusiness", and a theme I call "digital self fashioning" (see notes
here,
here and
here).
I'm a born New Yorker, but am recently relocated to Seattle, where the lakes, sound and mountains remind you that you're all-too-human, and where the creative, entrepreneurial manipulation of bits is ambient in the air....