

Yahoo Labs head Prabhakar Raghavan leaves (and joins Google) - plinkplonk
http://allthingsd.com/20120304/exclusive-yahoo-labs-head-raghavan-departing-to-google/?mod=tweet

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asciident
Does anyone have insight into whether the new Yahoo CEO is looking to cut
Yahoo Labs / Yahoo Research? Their have traditionally been a strong
information retrieval and data mining research powerhouse, but with the
outsourcing of Yahoo Search's ranking algorithms to Bing, I would be worried
about how Yahoo Labs can position themselves now.

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earl
Yahoo Research should have a big role to play in the company's future if
Thompson was serious about yahoo being a data company. They work on lots of
interesting ad matching / targeting tech. Thompson can't be that stupid, can
he? I can't understand how Prabhakar couldn't be retained. Yahoo Research is
the best non-google ML lab, and by far the best that shares any output; they
produce world class research. None of the people there will have any problem
landing on their feet; the employees there work for yahoo by choice. And from
my discussions with friends at Y Research, Prabhakar is highly respected by
his employees.

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joshu
When I was there (and this was a while ago) I felt like they were more focused
on emitting papers than helping us get anything done.

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ajays
A part of that is because the charter of Labs is (was?) to generate papers and
provide exposure to the company. It helps to attract talent if you're
presenting at large conferences about the interesting problems you're working
on.

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amcnellis
Looks like the deeper cuts, in his division and more broadly, are confirmed:
[http://allthingsd.com/20120305/yahoos-new-ceo-preps-major-
re...](http://allthingsd.com/20120305/yahoos-new-ceo-preps-major-
restructuring-including-significant-layoffs/)

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yaix
Y! had "Labs"?! Seriously, there hasn't been enything innovative from Y! in
years (or maybe I just overlooked it?).

Don't know if that's good or bad news for G. But since they messed up their UX
after MM was removed, I guess this is the logical next step.

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yaix
Please enlighten me. What has been coming out of those "Labs" recently? I was
honestly surprised hearing that there is still reseach going on at Y! Didn't
they usually buy companies to innovate?

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ajays
Here you go: <http://labs.yahoo.com/publications>

Yahoo Labs people regularly win "best paper" awards at top conferences.

