AltaVista Names Dr. Jan Pedersen Chief Scientist; Foremost Search and Retrieval Authority Joins Industry Pioneer to Extend Product Vision, Deliver Next Generation Search.

Business Editors

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 17, 2002

AltaVista Company, a leading global provider of search services and software and a majority-owned operating company of CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq:CMGI), has appointed Jan Pedersen, Ph.D., Chief Scientist. Pedersen will spearhead the company's middle- and long-term product initiatives, including research and development efforts on user-centric, next generation search technologies.

Prior to joining AltaVista, Pedersen held senior technical management positions with innovative start-ups pushing the limits of search and data categorization technologies in the electronic customer relationship management (eCRM), peer-to-peer (P2P) and wireless arenas. Pedersen has also held advanced technology positions in the consumer and enterprise search sectors, with tenure as Director of Advanced Technology and Director of Search and Spidering for the InfoSeek/Go Network, and Manager of the Advanced Technology Group at Verity, Inc.

"I couldn't have asked for a stronger search and retrieval pedigree or found a more visionary technologist than Jan Pedersen," said John Ellis, AltaVista's Executive Vice President, Engineering and Operations. "Jan brings talent, deep domain experience and proven leadership skills to AltaVista's revitalized product and engineering teams. We are very excited to be working with him, innovating to deliver the future of search technology."

"I am very pleased to join AltaVista at this exciting and pivotal juncture in the company's history," said Pedersen. "The product and engineering teams have made dramatic progress, and I look forward to working with the new management team to develop a suite of innovative new products."

In advance of joining AltaVista, Pedersen held senior engineering management positions at Centrata, Inc., a Kleiner Perkins-backed start-up in the data center automation space, and OpenGrid, Inc., a Motorola-backed Wireless Internet start-up. Previously, Pedersen spent two years at InfoSeek, one of the original Internet search engines. There he worked directly with Steve Kirsch, Infoseek's visionary founder and Chairman, developing ways to economically scale the Infoseek search service. Pedersen also managed the core InfoSeek search property through its acquisition by The Walt Disney Internet Group.

Prior to that, Pedersen managed the advanced technology group at Verity, where he was responsible for integrating new component technologies into the core Verity search engine product, including clustering, summarization and query-by-example (QBE). Pedersen also managed the server products group, developing and launching the Verity Knowledge Organizer text categorization product line.

Pedersen began his career at Xerox' Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), in the Lisp Machine Business Unit where he helped developed an integrated, lisp-based, programming environment. He also worked with the Natural Language Technology Group and last served as a Research Area Manager, responsible for the laboratory's Quantitative Content Analysis Group (QCA). During that time, the QCA group's output included 30 patent applications and the transfer of several technologies to the Xerox Software Division (XSoft), including a text retrieval engine and a trainable document summarizer.

Pedersen holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University and a BA in Statistics from Princeton University. He is credited with eleven issued patents and has authored twenty-three refereed publications on information access topics, seven of which are in the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) proceedings(1). Pedersen is a member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), an has participated in the SIGIR'97, SIGIR'98, SIGIR'99, World Wide Web Nine (WWW9) and Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'01) program committees. He was information retrieval track chair for the Symposium on Document Analysis and Information Retrieval (SDAIR) in 1996.

About AltaVista Company

AltaVista is a leading global provider of search services and software. The company's patented technology continues to set the pace, making AltaVista a leading search engine among Web users and premier provider of high-powered search software to intranet, enterprise and e-commerce clients around the globe. AltaVista is a majority-owned operating company of CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq: CMGI). For more information, see http://www.altavista.com and http://solutions.altavista.com.

(1) For a complete list of Pedersen's published work, see http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs and search for "jan w/2 pedersen" or "jw/2 pedersen."

AltaVista is a registered trademark of AltaVista Company. Other owner's product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.