I’m finally entering the public blogosphere after running an internal corporate blog for a couple of years. I work on search and spidering, mostly on the Ultraseek search engine. I’ve been on the web for over ten years and on the Internet for over twenty (my first ARPA e-mail address was before domains!).

Why “most casual observer”? My freshman physics professor at Rice was fond of the phrase “intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.” My friends and I thought that one of those would be a really handy thing to have available in the laboratory, because you could just ask them, get the obvious answer, and skip the experiments.

I don’t expect my observations to eliminate all your experiments, but I hope they will
save you some time. As Frank Westheimer at Harvard said, “a few months in the laboratory saves a few hours in the library.”