Has the University of New South Wales out-googled Google? According to this report Google has bought a new search algorithm from Ori Alon an Israeli who studied at UNSW and now works at Google’s offices in Mountain View California.
But apparently the university has registered a patent on the process meaning that at least some of the profit has to stay here. The algorithm goes under the name of Orion and was apparently also the subject of interest from Yahoo! and Microsoft.
According to the report “Orion, offers a list of topics directly related to the original search and only reveals the sites with enough words reasonably linked to one another and relevant to the search, according to a report in the Israeli business magazine TheMarker.” It “also rates the texts by quality of the site in which they appear.”
Sounds a lot like Google to me, but I guess we’ll find out more in the fullness of time. Seems like UNSW is doing well at schooling up hi-tech moguls. Another alumnus Shi Zhengrong has just been named Australia’s fifth richest man with a fortune of $3billion which appears to have been accumulated in only the last 14 years by developing solar technology, starting with a postgrad degree at the Uni.