U.C. Berkeley, birthplace of early search highflier Inktomi and the school where Google CEO Eric Schmidt got his computer science doctoral degree, is bringing together roughly 20 faculty members from various departments to cross-pollinate work on search technology, said Robert Wilensky, the center’s director. The principal areas of focus: privacy, fraud, multimedia search and personalization.

It’s difficult in a classroom setting to deal with issues of search when teaching students how to partake in academic research. Many of them gravitate towards Google or Yahoo! immediately, without really evaluating the sources in any way. Google Scholar seems to be an interesting movement to a better way of doing this, by limiting these searches to a source pool that is better evaluated, but it’s not very useful because of the way it is limited.

In 2004, they required the HP Compaq Business Notebook nw8000 of all incoming Freshman, at a pricetag of over $3200 each. Doesn’t matter if it’s the best price, or the most suitable machine, or what the student is familiar with: they all have to have identical machines.

Why? Because it makes life easier on them.

Easier isn’t always better.