Yahoo expands web-search research to Spain, Chile

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Internet media company Yahoo said on Sunday it was opening research centres in Spain and Chile, expanding its engineering efforts beyond the United States for the first time.

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 centres in Europe and Latin America.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company has hired Ricardo Baeza-Yates, an expert in web retrieval and data mining, who will lead the two new centres' work on topics related to web search and information extraction.

Chilean born Baeza-Yates will be based in Barcelona and report to Prabhakar Raghavan, the global head of research. Baeza-Yates has been affiliated with universities in both Santiago and Barcelona. His website is at http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/~rbaeza/.

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.

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.

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.

Web search rival Google has four US research centres and facilities in Switzerland, India and Japan.