Yahoo! Research opens new lab in Israel
13 Mar 2008
Sunnyvale, California: Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet company has announced that it has launched the Yahoo! Research Israel Lab, a new research lab in Haifa, Israel, its first in the region.
Dr Ronny Lempel, an information organisation and retrieval expert will head the new research lab. Lempel will directly report to Dr Ricardo Baeza-Yates, vice president of Yahoo! Research, the company reported.
Before joining Yahoo!, Lempel had earlier worked at the Information Retrieval Group at IBM's Haifa Research Lab, focusing on research and development for enterprise search systems.
The lab, which opened on Tuesday, will mainly focus on improvement of the next-generation web search, by reducing complex technology problems into simple solutions. Yahoo!'s arrival in Israel is a testimony to the company's commitment to discover new technologies that deliver compelling experiences on the web.
"Search is still in its infancy. At Yahoo!,we are working on the hard core science that can lead to search experiences that are significantly beyond the current art." said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research.
"Israel is fertile ground for incredibly talented technologists, researchers and engineers, and the Yahoo! Research Israel Lab provides the best opportunity to create the technologies that will underpin the next generation of search on the Internet," Lempel said. "I look forward to building the Haifa team with the best talent this region has to offer."
Yahoo! ranks second in online search behind Google. In January, Google accounted for 58.5 per cent of US web searches, while Yahoo had 22.2 per cent, according to a research report published by ComScore, a renowned internet marketing research company.
| comScore Core Search Report* January 2008 Total US - Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch 2.0 | |||
| Share of Searches (%) | |||
| Core Search Entity | Dec-07 | Jan-08 | Point Change Jan-08 vs. Dec-07 |
| Total Core Search | 100.0% | 100.0% | 0.0 |
| Google Sites | 58.4% | 58.5% | 0.1 |
| Yahoo! Sites | 22.9% | 22.2% | -0.7 |
| Microsoft Sites | 9.8% | 9.8% | 0.0 |
| AOL LLC** | 4.6% | 4.9% | 0.3 |
| Ask Network | 4.3% | 4.5% | 0.2 |
* This search is based on the five major search engines, which include partner searches and cross-channel searches. The report does not include searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five-search engine.
** In January 2008, Time Warner Network was split into AOL LLC and Time Warner Network excluding AOL, with AOL LLC representing the core search business.
Yahoo! Inc, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, is a leading global Internet brand, which provides a range of products and services such as a web portal, a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news, and posting to its users.