Besides Outride, Google acquired Kaltix in September 2003. Here is the press release from Google and an article from CNET about Kaltix in August 2003. There are three founders in Kaltix and they may be Taher, Haveliwala, Sepandar Kamvar, and Glen Jeh. They co-authored a paper to do analytic comparison of personalized PageRank. Initially, each guy has a first-author publication related with personalized PageRank.
Haveliwala: Topic-Sensitive PageRank, WWW02;
Jeh: Scaling Personalized Web Search, WWW03;
Kamvar: Extrapolation Method for Accelerrating PageRank computation, WWW03. Recently, Professor Junghoo Cho from UCLA has a related publication: Automatic Identification of User Interest for Personalized Search, WWW06. His work is to incorporate implicit feedback into the PageRank.
