San Francisco Bay Area
- Current
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- Principal Consultant at Search Tools Consulting
- Past
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- Speaker at Enterprise Search Summit
- Product Manager & Technical Writer at StarNine Technologies
- User Advocate, Publications Director at Metrowerks
- Experience Designer, Programmer, Documentation, Technical Support at Niles & Associates
- Education
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- School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS), UC Berkeley
- University of California, Berkeley
- San Francisco State University (Cal State SF)
- Recommended
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1 person has recommended Avi - Connections
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223
connections
- Industry
- Information Technology and Services
- Websites
Avi Rappoport’s Summary
Consult on enterprise search, vertical portals, intranets, departmental search, commerce and informational site search. I'm very user-focused, committed to making search technology work for staff, customers and other end users.
I'm available for large projects such as enterprise search evaluation, information needs analysis, configuration, and training. I like working with taxonomists and information architects to leverage their work for better search and vice versa.
I also do smaller contracts, including search recommendations for intranets, portals, and web sites.
Avi Rappoport’s Experience
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Principal Consultant
Search Tools Consulting
(Information Technology and Services industry)
January 1998 — Present (11 years 11 months)
Available for long and short-term consulting projects, I have design patterns and best practices for all elements of search, from robot crawling to relevance ranking to search log analytics.
Web site and intranet search engines can be enormously helpful in providing access to information, but they are often badly designed and implemented. My mission is to change that, to offer information about reasonable functionality and interface, to encourage transparent interactions and improve access to valuable information -
Speaker
Enterprise Search Summit
(Computer Software industry)
May 2004 — November 2008 (4 years 7 months)
Enterprise Search Summit site search, intranets, and portals; covering swarch functionality, user interface, data gathering, and search log analytics. It includes related topics such as taxonomy, classification, legal discovery, and social networking search. I spoke at the first six conferences, on search log file analytics, search failure, tuning search, "Best Bets", indexing issues, and user interface. I have also taught four-hour "Enterprise Search 101" workshop before the conference itself.
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Product Manager & Technical Writer
StarNine Technologies
(Public Company; 501-1000 employees; QDEK; Computer Software industry)
January 1996 — January 1998 (2 years 1 month)
I managed the last revision of Mac MS Mail (renamed Quarterdeck Mail), a Mac OS 8/9 hosted client-server email system, which made a nice net profit. I was also responsible for StarNine Email gateways, ListSTAR mailing list manager and WebCollage scriptable publishing system. I collaborated in the design and scheduling of the programming, the marketing and business aspects, shepherded the programmers and outside contractors, worked with technical support and sales departments, managed the documentation and many other aspects of these product lines.
For the Mac OS web server WebSTAR, I wrote the manuals for the third and forth versions covering everything from installation to getting SSL certificates to understanding CGIs to Terms of Service. I won several accolades for the clarity and depth of the documentation from industry magazines such as Macworld and TidBITS. -
User Advocate, Publications Director
Metrowerks
(Public Company; 51-200 employees; MWRK; Computer Software industry)
May 1994 — December 1995 (1 year 8 months)
I started off doing tech support and general user advocacy and found myself running the technical publications department. In that capacity, I chose and implemented a hypertext documentation system for PowerPlant, the company's emerging C++ Framework, advocated for more helpful error messages, managed five technical writers, edited all documentation, and wrote the "read me" files for thrice-yearly product releases.
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Experience Designer, Programmer, Documentation, Technical Support
Niles & Associates
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)
February 1989 — April 1994 (5 years 3 months)
I was a part of the team working on the EndNote Bibliography and Reference Manager software, working on everything from tech support, documentation, programming and interface design, represented the company with large corporate and educational customers, worked at computer shows, in the library community and at Apple developer conferences. The company was so small that I also answered phones, typed in user registrations, stuffed envelopes and, when we were very busy, helped with shipping product.
Avi Rappoport’s Education
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School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS), UC Berkeley
Masters of Library and Information Studies , Information Retrieval, Library Automation, Information Access , 1987 — 1988
The school has changed its name to School of Information Systems and Management, and now the I-School / Information School / School of Information.
Since graduating, I have audited a course, worked with the Alumni Association, presented talks at seminars and generally kept in touch.- Activities and Societies:
- Frequent guest speaker assistant, Class Graduation organizing committee, Computer Lab Help Desk, Pascal Programming class TA, Alumni Association Board of Directors, occasional seminar presenter
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University of California, Berkeley
AB , Medieval Studies , 1984 — 1986
- Activities and Societies:
- A happy attendee at the Medieval Studies Lunch Group.
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San Francisco State University (Cal State SF)
History September 1979 — June 1981
Additional Information
Avi Rappoport’s Websites:
Avi Rappoport’s Interests:
enterprise search, user interface design, UI, user experience, UX, information architecture, IA, unstructured information, indexing, robot crawling, web spiders, indexing, query processing, retrieval, recall, precision, relevance, log analysis
