Resourceshelf has culled the upcoming WWW conference for selected references to search. There’s also a whole track on the Semantic Web.
The complete list is a Who’s Who of search stars and a telling map of who’s doing interesting research in the area. Included: Intel, University of Washington, IBM, Yahoo (Understanding User Goals in Search), National University of Singapore, MIT, Microsoft. A9’s Udi Manber (who I did meet with, but can’t go into our talk quite yet) is giving a keynote.
OK, I think I have to go to this.