Yahoo! sets up lab in Bangalore

Internet firm Yahoo! Inc has expanded its India R&D operations with the launch of Yahoo! Labs "" Bangalore, its first in the country. The lab will focus on next generation search and advertising technologies.

As an extension of its R&D operations here, Yahoo! India Lab will initially have a 100-member team of scientists and engineers. Rajeev Rastogi has been appointed vice president and head of the new lab.

The move is aimed at making the Web more relevant and simple for users and advertisers. "As Yahoo! sixth lab worldwide and first in Asia, the Bangalore centre will focus on software for information extraction, multimedia and query processing," said Yahoo! India Research head Prabhakar Raghavan.

Yahoo!'s five other labs are located in Silicon Valley, New York and Burbank in California (US), Santiago in Chile and Barcelona in Spain.

The company did not disclose the investment being made in setting up the lab. "The India lab will work in tandem with other labs in the US. While the R&D centre will write software codes for various functions, the lab will develop products for data base, index-based search and matching content for seamless view by users as well as advertisers," Raghavan added.

Yahoo! India, which sacked about 40 employees last month for non-performance and slowed down recruitment in the wake of unsolicited bid by global software major Microsoft to acquire its parent firm recently, plans to resume hiring to expand its operations this year.

"The lay-off was part of our global exercise to retain the best and optimise our resource pool. We are looking for talent beyond science and engineering fields to add value to our creative output," Yahoo! India R&D Chief Operating Officer Pranesh Anthapur said.

Yahoo! India presently has around 1,500 people. Anthapur said the Indian operations is recording 50 per cent growth year-on-year in hiring.

Later this year, Yahoo! India is organising 'Big Thinkers India Series 2008', which will cover topics such as pricing, understanding new interactive media and computational advertising.