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Israel and Australia lay claim to latest Google genius

Colin Barker ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 10 Apr 2006 16:50 BST

Google has secured the services of a student at the University of New South Wales who has developed a better way of searching data.

The 26-year-old doctoral student, Ori Allon, has developed a new search algorithm that will make the responses to searches more relevant and display more detail of a search, according to reports in the Sydney Morning Herald, and in the Israel newspaper Ha'aretz.

Allon, who has named the algorithm Orion, is an Israeli who was headhunted by Google. Reportedly, Google has paid an "undisclosed sum" to the university to secure Allon's services. He is now working at Google's offices in the US after reportedly turning down offers from Yahoo and Microsoft.

When a user conducts a Web search using Orion, they receive expanded text extracts from the pages that it delivers, rather than just links to these pages. This, according to admirers of the service, means users don't have to click on multiple pages to see if they contain the information they're seeking.