Microsoft to absorb 200 Yahoo employees at Bangalore centre

Microsoft India R&D, which currently has a development centre in Hyderabad, today announced the expansion of its activities to Bangalore, following its tie-up with search engine Yahoo.

The Bangalore team will focus on product development and applied research in web search and online ad technologies. "It will initially have 200-plus employees, the vast majority of whom would transit to Microsoft from Yahoo as part of the Microsoft-Yahoo search alliance," Satya Nadella, Microsoft's senior vice-president, R&D, online services division, told reporters in Bangalore.

"The Bangalore centre joins Hyderabad as one of the core hubs of development and research for OSD. The innovations from our Hyderabad team are already having a significant impact on our US, UK, Canada, Australia and India products. The combined skills and talent of our existing OSD team at Hyderabad and the Yahoo employees who join us now in Bangalore will enhance India's contribution to our OSD innovation charter, inclusive of Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Ad Centre," he said.

"We are confident that once the transition is completed, the companies' unified search market place will deliver even greater and improved innovation for consumers, better volume and efficiency for advertisers and better monetisation opportunities for web publishers," Nadella said.

Of the 400 Yahoo employees taken by Microsoft, 200 were from India. This team would work together to build up a great technology footprint. While Yahoo would continue to build on the search engine experience, Microsoft technology would build the technology. It will provide the index and the crawls.

The impact of this alliance for lay users would be in terms of better search results, whether they log onto Yahoo search or MSN Bing. The underlying search engine would be the same for both. The alliance will help users leverage the combined strength of Microsoft and Yahoo and to expand their search experience results, he said. It would also help advertisers who had to choose between Yahoo, MSN and Google to come to one place to advertise products.