Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Joins Yahoo! To Lead Research Efforts in Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile
Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc. is opening its first research labs in Europe and South America, continuing a quest to close the gap separating it from online search engine leader Google Inc.
Internet media company Yahoo said it was opening research centers in Spain and Chile, expanding its engineering efforts beyond the United States for the first time. The new offices in Spain and Chile, scheduled to open soon, will be led by Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, a newly hired expert in information retrieval.
Chilean born Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates will lead both centers in their focus on topics related to Web search and information extraction. He will be mainly based in Barcelona and report directly to Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research.
Baeza-Yates is the latest search industry expert to join Yahoo’s research team. He is the co-author of Modern Information Retrieval, the most used textbook on search translated into Chinese and Korean, among various books.
Baeza-Yates, a former Catalonian Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) researcher and Professor at UPF, will play a crucial role in helping to establish strong partnerships between Barcelona Media, CWR and Yahoo! as well as draw on the expertise of the vast technical talent throughout Europe and Latin America. Baeza-Yates is an expert on information retrieval and one of the top scientists in this area. He earned a Bachelor and Masters Degree in both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Chile, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He is also the co-author of Modern Information Retrieval, the most used textbook on search, as well as several other books.
Yahoo! provides me with the opportunity to discover and build the new sciences of the next generation of the Internet and have an impact on more than 400 million users, said Baeza-Yates. Our partnerships with Barcelona Media and the Center for Web Research provide Yahoo! with the opportunity to tap into a wealth of expertise in exploring and discovering innovative techniques in various areas of Web research.
Yahoo, which has stepped up its research efforts in Web search and other technology areas over the past year, will have six research facilities worldwide, with four existing locations in the United States and centers in Europe and Latin America.
Andrei Broder, former vice president of research at pioneering Web search system AltaVista and subsequently a chief technology officer at IBM Research, joined Yahoo as vice president of emerging search technology in November.
With the recent hires of search industry experts including Andrei Broder and now Ricardo, Yahoo! continues to expand its growing bench of world-class technical talent and scientists.
This is an exciting opportunity for Yahoo research to draw on the talent and knowledge across Europe and Latin America and strengthen our collaboration with universities that lead in research and development, said Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, who was hired last year to oversee the company’s research labs.
The Sunnyvale-based company declined to disclose how many employees it is hiring in the two offices. Yahoo had 9,800 workers worldwide at the end of last year.
The Barcelona office will be run together with the Center for Innovation Barcelona Media, a non-profit institution with local industry and Catalan government support, which has ties to Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and other local colleges.
The Santiago office will be run in conjunction with the Center for Web Research (CWR), founded by Baeza-Yates and funded by the Millennium Scientific Initiative of Chile’s Planning Ministry. It will be hosted by the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Chile.
Despite the expansion, Yahoo has recently been losing search engine market share to Google. Google controlled 39.8 percent of the U.S. search market through November while Yahoo trailed at 29.5 percent, according to comScore Media Metrix.
Yahoo also is under pressure from investors to improve its formulas for determining which ads to display alongside search results. Ad selection plays an important role in Yahoo’s profits because the company gets paid only when the links are clicked on. Even Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel has conceded Google’s ad algorithms generate more revenue.
The science of the Internet is still very much in its infancy and there are very few experts in the world that have the capabilities and know-how to move the needle forward in this area, said Dr. Usama Fayyad, Yahoo!’s chief data officer and senior vice president overseeing Yahoo! Research.
We believe that the expansion of Yahoo! Research across Europe and Latin America provides us with the opportunity to tap into some of the most renowned scientists in the world to help Yahoo enhance its content and search offerings that reach our growing global base of more than 400 million users, the world’s largest Internet audience.
Yahoo has been spending more on research as it tries to catch up with Mountain View-based Google in the lucrative Internet search engine market.
Web search rival Google has four U.S. research centers and facilities in Switzerland, India and Japan.