According to Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, the 26-year-old Israeli-born student Ori Allon - a University of New South Wales doctoral candidate - has not only successfully created his own search engine, called Orion; he has also succeeded in having himself (and the engine's all-important algorithm) be snapped up by Google.

Allon's research project, "RichProlog, a System for Deducing, Inducing and Learning in the Declarative Programming Paradigm" was aimed at what the Sydney Morning Herald summarizes as "improving the relevance of responses to a search - and displaying a more detailed taste of each file so users can better decide if it is what they need."

Allon, who was born and raised in Israel before coming to Australia in the mid-90s and becoming an Australian citizen, told the newspaper from the Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA, that he certainly hopes to come back and contribute to Australia thanks to the expertise he acquired in Australian universities and that he is continually acquiring during his time overseas.

But when you're still only 26 and have already extended considerably the scope of the declarative programming paradigm, one can't help wondering whether - beautiful though Australia may be - Ori Allon isn't more likely to linger awhile in Silicon Valley. Advanced text search algorithms good enough for Google to secure development rights don't come along every day of the week. Ori Allon, now a Google employee not a doctoral student, may well find himself tied to the Googleplex with golden handcuffs that make even Sydney Harbor seem No Big Deal.

Time will tell.

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