Industry-Academic Relationships

Without question, university research has played a critical role in the exploration of ideas in indexing, crawling, and user-interface design. Industry and the academy have always worked together sometimes working well, occasionally at cross-purposes. In the area of information seeking, historically the relationship has been clear: The academic environment gave support, instruction, and a nurturing environment to the early search engines. Without academia, the search world would be quite different today. Perhaps search engines would have arrived on the technology landscape without the university, but, without question, university research has played a critical role in the exploration of ideas in indexing, crawling, and user-interface design.The academy generates and tests ideas through the vehicle of graduate students, professors, grants, and small-to-medium-scale experimentation. The industrial world scales ideas that work into fully operational systems. No one sphere of research holds a lock on novel ideas or innovation, but both mutually profit by having relationships allowing ideas and people to add to our field's vigor.