Yahoo! to develop next-generation products from India lab
Bangalore, March 4, 2008 (IANS)

Leading search engine and news and entertainment portal Yahoo! has set up a laboratory here to develop next-generation products for its global customers and users, a company official said Tuesday. As Yahoo!'s sixth lab worldwide and first in Asia, the Bangalore facility will focus on developing software for information extraction and machine learning, multimedia and query processing. Yahoo!'s five other labs are located in the Silicon Valley, New York and Burbank in California in the US, Santiago in Chile and Barcelona in Spain.

"As an extension of our research and development (R&D) operations here, Yahoo! India Lab will initially have 100-member team of scientists and engineers. They will work on multiple projects to make the Web more relevant and simple for users and advertisers worldwide," Yahoo! India Research head Prabhakar Raghavan told reporters here.

As a policy, company officials did not disclose the investment made in setting up the lab and revenue generated by the Indian subsidiary through its multiple operations spanning research, computational advertising and content generation.

"The India lab will work in tandem with the other labs in the US for deriving new algorithms to enhance the performance of our search and retrieval tools, said Raghavan.

"While the R&D centre will write software codes for various functions, the lab will develop products for database, index-based search and matching content for seamless view by users as well as advertisers."

Yahoo! India, which sacked about 40 employees last month for non-performance and stopped recruitment in the wake of unsolicited bid by global software major Microsoft to acquire its parent firm recently, plans resume hiring aggressively 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 some of the brightest talent beyond science and engineering fields to add value to our creative output. Many Indian geeks and scientists in Europe and the US are looking for opportunities to return and work in India," Yahoo! India R&D CEO Pranesh Anthapur said.