Yahoo to establish research lab in Bangalore

Yahoo, the $6 billion internet major battling various odds including competition from Google, is in the process of starting its research lab in Bangalore. This will be Yahoo's seventh site globally after four centres in the US and one each in Barcelona and Chile.

Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research, in Bangalore said: "We have initiated the process of setting up our lab in Bangalore and have started hiring scientists for this unit. There is no time-frame when this centre will start its operations as it depends on the caliber of people we hire and when the centre will be acquire a critical mass of people."

Yahoo already runs a research & development centre in Bangalore with around 700 personnel. The centre, other than developers, employs researchers who are currently working on applied research. The new centre will look at hiring senior mentors and partners for the existing researchers.

"The researchers currently we have are extremely talented and work on state-of-the-art technologies. The scientists we are looking to hire are the ones who define start-of-the-art next generation technologies," Raghavan said.

According to Yahoo, the mission of its research wing is to develop the world-class science that will deliver the next generation of businesses to the company.

"Our scientists focus on data-driven analysis, high-quality search, algorithms and economic models. Yahoo manages many of the largest and richest data repositories in the world, and our researchers mine insights from these giant collections, individually and collectively, maintaining the privacy of our users while setting new standards for user value," said Raghavan about Yahoo research initiatives.

Yahoo is building up capabilities in an effort to develop search into much more than getting answers to a query. The internet has become a utility. We are focussing on how to use this utility to enhance human to human communication. We are trying to understand various behaviourial patterns of our half a billion users on how we can make their lives simple as they go about their day to day lives. To drive this initiative Yahoo is hiring not only computer scientists, but scientists in sociology, economics and other related fields, he said.

The internet major also announced the launch of its 'Big Thinker' lecture series in India from January 2007. This globally renowned series will have lectures on science, technology and internet and will feature experts from the Yahoo think tank. The lectures will target academia, scientists, the corporate world and the media. They will feature topics such as community systems, web search, pricing on the internet and web mining.