Preface

Life is full of serendipitous moments, few of which stand out for me (Grant) like the one that now defines my career. It was the late 90s, and I was a young software developer working on distributed electromagnetics simulations when I happened on an ad for a developer position at a small company in Syracuse, New York, called TextWise. Reading the description, I barely thought I was qualified for the job, but decided to take a chance anyway and sent in my resume. Somehow, I landed the job, and thus began my career in search and natural language processing. Little did I know that, all these years later, I would still be doing search and NLP, never mind writing a book on those subjects.