Matthew Berk

Yes, no blog. :)

At present I am EVP, Product Engineering, for Marchex, Inc. In this role, I manage an engineering staff of just over 100. We do some pretty interesting things at scale, viz.:
  • telephony: millions of calls routed every month
  • ad targeting: over a billion ads served daily
  • search and data mining: hundreds of millions of queries monthly, and data sets in the hundreds of millions of records
  • publishing: tens of millions of visitors monthly, across hundreds of thousands of sites
Marchex is seven years old, publicly-traded (MCHX), headquartered in Seattle, and employs roughly 300 people.

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 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. 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, telephony, 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 love 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....