Yahoo sets up new lab in India

Yahoo is establishing a lab in Bangalore, India, where the company already has R&D operations. While the current R&D done by Yahoo in India is focused on new products and engineering, the focus of the new lab will be on long-term research, a spokeswoman for the company said Tuesday.

Yahoo Labs Bangalore will be a center of excellence for next generation search and advertising technologies, focused on making the Web more relevant and simple for users and advertisers, Yahoo said.

The company has hired Rajeev Rastogi, who has moved from head of Bell Labs India to lead the new lab, and assemble a team of scientists and engineers to focus on new approaches to information extraction and machine learning, multimedia and query processing, the company said.

It did not provide details of the number of staff it plans to hire for the lab. The company plans to hire sociologists, micro-economists, and computational scientists among other categories of staff for the lab, the spokeswoman said.

Yahoo already employs some 1,500 staff in India, which it plans to take to over 2,000 by the end of this year. Yahoo R&D is involved in the development of some of Yahoo's key products and services such as mobile Internet and search.

Yahoo has similar labs in New York, Santiago, and Barcelona, along with Santa Clara, Burbank and Berkeley in California.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.