Most (all?) of these folks were from U of Arizona, IIRC (but again don't trust my memory :-) so I wouldn't be surprised if there was some collaboration. Udi Manber, who taught probably the best algorithms class I ever took, wrote or had his hands in agrep (a fast approximate grep) and the Glimpse/WebGlimpse/Harvest indexers. His old web page says he's a VP at Amazon, so perhaps he actually prospered during the dotcom saga...