Yahoo! to launch new search engine in India by H2 2011

Leading internet company Yahoo! is all set to unveil its latest search offering 'Search Direct' in India by the second half of this calendar, said a top official of Yahoo! here today.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo!'s chief scientist, senior vice-president and head (Yahoo! Labs) said the Nasdaq-listed digital media company has already rolled out the public beta version of Search Direct in the US last week.

"The new search engine predicts search results as fast as a person types – character by character, and presents those results dynamically, generating a fast, simple search experience that goes beyond mere blue links," Raghavan told media persons here.

He said it (Search Direct) follows a theme that the company has been pursuing ever since they forged a search alliance with Microsoft.

"The idea is to provide the user not with links but with answers.  We expect Search Direct, a combination of completing what you were trying to type and fulfill your vertical-search intents including entertainment and shopping, which we launching in the US recently. We will be doing that in India in a few months from now," he said.

Yahoo!, which currently employs around 2,000 professional at its Bangalore Lab has a massive reach of 30 million unique users per month in India and reaches to 74% of the Indian Internet audience.

According to Raghavan, the company has been growing in double-digit numbers in India in terms of employees and was looking at continuing that growth this year as well.

He said over the last four years, the Bangalore centre has yielded a 50% average year-on-year increase in idea submissions for patent consideration.