Search’s Future - What is academia up to?

An article at SEO Chat posits that since search was born in academia, its most important advancements will also take place there.

Carnegie Mellon University was the birthplace of Lycos, one of the oldest search engines on the web. Stanford University can boast of being the birthplace of two of the most widely used search engines, Google and Yahoo. So no one should be surprised that, as the challenges of search have changed over the past few years, universities are moving to stay at the forefront of research and development related to search.

The University of California at Berkeley brought this point home recently by announcing the creation of an interdisciplinary center for advanced search technologies. The university is talking with a number of search companies to interest them in the project, including Google. Robert Wilensky, the center’s director and a professor of computer science and information management at the university, speaks about the center with infectious enthusiasm. “If you have 20 researchers interested in search, then getting them together where they are cross-fertilizing ideas, you make something bigger than its parts. You can create a nuclear reaction,” he said in an interview with CNet. Professor Wilensky hopes to open the interdisciplinary center early next year.

Privacy, asking questions of search engines, the indexing of an increasingly non-textual internet, and more are concerns for the next-generation of search engines.