Antonio Gulli's homepage offers some fantastic resources for students of IR and anyone interested in the world of web search. Antonio was the founder of Italy's first search engine back in 1998 - Arianna. He now offers on his site several metasearch engines that pull results back from the major SEs and compile them (albeit somewhat slowly from my geography).

Antonio has also written several important papers on wide-ranging subjects like meta-search, clustering and the automatic creation of web directories through spidering - a particularly impressive idea and paper.

According to the AskJeeves blog, Antonio was hired to be a part of their Teoma search engine (along with his team from Pisa, Italy) in late February. Congratulations to Antonio and to AskJeeves who can take pride in having such great people working with them.