Everybody's a Star

You don't really expect to see your computer science professors on TV, except perhaps on something like Nova. I was watching Star Trek: Enterprise at my son's suggestion (and I guess I'm old school, but it's no Star Trek) when I see a strange ad for a search engine called ask.com and realize that it's Apostolos Gerasoulis from the Rutgers University Computer Science Department. I knew that he had founded a search engine company back in the late dot com days, and there he was as a kind of Dave Thomas of search engines, talking in his inimitable accent about searching for car rims.

I don't know how you go about selling a search engine - I think only Google knows that. But if you want to see the ads, they're here:

http://media.ask.com/creatives/ag_rims.mov
http://media.ask.com/creatives/ag_librarians.mov