The University of California at Berkeley is creating an interdisciplinary centre for advanced search technologies and is in talks with search giants including Google to join the project, ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com has learned.
The project is one of many efforts at US universities designed to address the explosive growth of Internet search and the complex issues that have arisen in the field.
UC Berkeley, birthplace of early search highflier Inktomi and the school where Google chief executive Eric Schmidt got his computer science doctorate, is bringing together roughly 20 faculty members from various departments to cross-pollinate work on search technology, said Robert Wilensky, the centre's director and a professor of computer science and information management at Berkeley. The principal areas of focus: privacy, fraud, multimedia search and personalisation.
"We want to solve the problems that have been engendered by the success of search," Wilensky said in an interview.
Plans are still being worked out for the centre's physical space, but Wilensky said he hopes designs will be completed within the next few months and the centre opened early next year. He also said he's talking to Google and other search players about membership.
"If you have 20 researchers interested in search, then getting them together where they are cross-fertilising ideas, you make something bigger than its parts. You can create a nuclear reaction," he said.
Google declined to comment. (Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.)
The success of the $5bn-a-year search-advertising business is fuelling Internet research and development in many ways. The business has not only bolstered the likes of Yahoo and Google with billion-dollar annual revenues to be spent in new areas but it's also revived hundreds of smaller dot-coms and inspired leagues of upstarts to venture into areas of specialty search.
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