Inktomi's Directory Engine Group

The Directory Engine (DE) was a product to do large scale classification of web pages into directories with tens of thousands of categories. It had precision that varied between the 70-95% representing the best observed performance for a text classifier on this scale.

At the time of the first release of the product, the roster was:

Dr. Mike Palmer (PhD CS)
Dr. Hongyuan Zha (PhD CS)
Dr. Gordon Sun (PhD Physics)
Sean Suchter
Gordon Rios

Later, Devika Chawla, David Nadler (PhD Math) and Jean-marc Langlois (PhD Applied Physics), and Chris Currivan joined the group. The Directory Engine development group was disbanded as the technology downturn devastated the ranks of DE's customer base. The surviving customers are still using the technology and maintaining it with tools written primarily by Sean Suchter (now a director at Yahoo).