Company History

History of the Company

Ron Millett had his first exposure to computer search as a researcher at Brigham Young University in the 1980’s, working in a CAD/CAM technology lab where he expanded an expert system shell algorithm to apply it to full text search.  Spinoffs of this technology helped companies such as SoftSolutions, WordPerfect and Folio compete in the growing search tool and document management market.  Ron went to work for WordPerfect and while there he developed QuickFinder, which was the world’s first search engine inside a word processor.  As WordPerfect became part of Novell, Ron and his team installed QuickFinder into Groupwise, Novell’s email application. Today, QuickFinder is still used by Novell within Groupwise and as Novell’s WebSearch application (now renamed back to QuickFinder).  During this time, Ron Millett authored or co-authored 10 patents relating to search.  Later in his career, Ron continued work on search for Cogito.

On July 4th, 2005, Ron Millett was considering how Moore’s law had applied to hardware, seeing the doubling of processing power every 18 months, but that there had not been any significant speed improvement on the software side of search retrieval technology.  As he pondered this, he had a breakthrough about how to approach the query process from a different angle.  Ron decided that the ideas were exciting enough that he should try to create a company to develop these ideas.  He approached Bruce Tietjen, who was a long-time associate with Ron and who had co-authored 4 patents with Ron relating to search, and Bruce agreed to work on the project from his home in Taiwan.  Work was begun that resulted in two initial patent applications through Workman Nydegger, a prominent IP law firm in Utah.

During this development period, Ron began collaboration with Dillon Inouye, a professor at Brigham Young University, who had a PhD from Stanford University.  Dillon, a gifted visionary, had previous search experience through co-founding Folio Corporation, which was later sold to FAST.  While Dillon was contemplating Ron’s ideas, he spent some time assisting his parents who have a farm in central Utah.  Dillon later reported that while pondering the issues of search, he had a flood of ideas come to his mind that related to harvesting processes that he grew up using on the farm.  The process of using a combine to harvest grain was among the ideas he captured.  He wrote and developed a number of ideas based on this experience.

Dillon provided some initial funding starting in January, 2006, but more importantly, he challenged Ron on a few of his ideas and added more ideas.  Ron said that some of these ideas were contrary to general principles commonly accepted by computer engineers.  For several months, Ron could see no way to implement Dillon's ideas, saying these ideas just couldn’t be implemented, but Dillon persisted, and eventually Ron saw a way to implement Dillon’s ideas into code.   John Higgins, former professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at BYU, provided crucial help at this stage in helping to develop these key concepts.  After much collaboration and combining of Dillon’s visionary perspective and Ron’s unique programming abilities, Ron developed a prototype around these ideas and they knew they had discovered a game-changing and disruptive technology in the field of search.   They engaged Workman Nydegger, a prominent IP law firm in Utah, and filed several joint patents on this "Hyperspace 1, 2, and 3" technology where each of the numbers represent components of speed capability.

On January 23, 2007, Perfect Search Corporation was incorporated in the State of Delaware.  By this time, George Watanabe had joined the team and he helped raise $200,000 within the first few months of Perfect Search's incorporation.  Tim Stay became the interim CEO in March and in June was made the official CEO for Perfect Search.  In the spring of 2007, George Watanabe raised another $2.8 million for the company, from a number of angel investors.  By summer of 2007, the engineering team was assembled, an office was secured in Orem, Utah, and the work began to transition the software from a prototype to production level software.  In the spring of 2008, Ken Ebert joined at the Chief Technical Officer, allowing Ron to focus on innovation and patents as the Chief Scientist.  

During the development of the software, a number of new ideas were solidified and enhanced, and so far, a total of eight patents have been applied for around the developing technology.