Prabhakar Raghavan - Yahoo! Search Master

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Dan Farber has a great profile of Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo's new chief of research late of IBM and recently snaffled away from Verity.

ahoo has its sights set on Nobel prizes and making breakthroughs to ensure the future of the company. I don’t think he was exaggerating. Search and creating more personalized user experiences that take advantage of underlying data and relationships is still in an infant phase. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other major players understand that the spoils will go to those who provide answers, rather than links, and develop ways in which billions of consumers and creators of content can participate in an economic and social value chain.

Raghavan has been in the job just over a month, but he has been impressed by what he called the "thirst for ideas that flow form research to the business." He acknowledged that moving research into products is a challenge. He listed improving search, building a better advertising platform, making better sense of social media, large-scale distributed computing, and developing incentive structures and tools as his goals

I've avoided all the "brain drain" posts and job listings so far as they just don't interest me much, but this piece gives a hell of a lot of insight into where Yahoo! and Search in general is heading. Well worth a read...