The Future of Search? It’s Academic
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Google, Yahoo, Inktomi, Lycos...many search engines, including some of the best modern ones, were born on college campuses. It is no surprise, therefore, to hear that some of the most exciting research projects focused on the future of internet search are still located in academia. This article details a few of these projects, giving a glimpse into the way we may be searching five years from now.
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.
Berkeley’s center is just one project among many that have been inspired by the booming growth of internet search. With $5 billion spent on search advertising every year, the major search engines have been funding their own research projects, and smaller start-up companies have looked to cash in by carving out niches in specialty search areas. Even with the tremendous amount of activity in the private sector, however, those who want to see what search will look like in five or ten years would be wise to see what is brewing in the universities today. “A big source of new ideas comes out of universities,” notes Geoff Yang, a venture capitalist whose firm has backed such companies as Ask Jeeves and TiVo.
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