You can get some of this from Google Scholar's metrics pages, which list, for each venue, the most-cited papers since 2008. These indeed seem to be different than the best-paper selections, though I haven't examined this systematically. (I guess you could take the best-paper and look at its citation rank out of papers that year. But this raises other questions; for example, is the point of best paper award to select the paper that will be most influential?)

From this page, http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en... , click "Subcategories" under "Engineering & Computer Science": for example, "Artificial Intelligence," "Computational Linguistics," or "Human Computer Interaction." It lists the most-cited-venues for each area, but if you click on a particular venue you get its list of most-cited-papers.

Here are a few that are also on Jeff Huang's list:

ICML: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_artificiali...

NIPS: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_artificiali...

AAAI: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_artificiali...

ACL: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computation...

EMNLP: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computation...

CHI: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_humancomput...

CVPR: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computervis...

A site that lists both (building off this one) is http://arnetminer.org/conferencebestpapers

What impacts industry 10 years later is more a measure of marketing and brand association than academic excellence.

Google could fart now and the internet will still cry roses.

The same research/algorithms/software produced by an independent individual or lab would simply die in obscurity.

That's because, unlike physical science and engineering disciplines, the application of discoveries in computer science (i.e. software engineering) is done in the context of an ultra-competitive popularity-contest culture, mixed with a strong strain of loner-nerd-hacking-the-gibson worship.

I came to software development from the physical sciences (university level academic and theoretical as well as applied/engineering). To me the differences were abundant and, frankly, shocking. For a discipline that fancies itself one of the more intellectual, there seems to be an awful lot of petty one-upsmanship and "john galt genius" idiocy at work.

Oh crying baby, don't cry.