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Google Pinches Yahoo Research Head

Poaching talent is common between tech giants, but Yahoo needs all the brains it can hold onto. Alas, Prabhakar Raghavan, the highly regarded head of Yahoo Labs -- and until recently its head of strategy -- is leaving for Google. Worse yet, “the departure comes ahead of possibly deep cuts in his division, which is in charge of long-term research at the Silicon Valley Internet giant,” reports AllThingsD, citing sources. Confirming Raghavan’s departure -- but not the additional department cuts -- Yahoo said its CTO, Ash Munshi, will now head up Y Labs.

It isn’t yet clear what Raghavan’s will be doing at Google. “But, as head of Yahoo Labs, Raghavan’s research arena has been extensive, encompassing everything from data mining to algorithms to search,” AllThingsD notes. Along with being a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University, Raghavan has also “co-authored two textbooks, on randomized algorithms and on information retrieval,” according to his bio.

“More to the point,” AllThingsD adds, “he was very well respected within [Yahoo], which seems to be curtailing its commitment to research as it attempts to turn itself around under the new leadership of CEO Scott Thompson.”

 


Read the whole story at All Things D »

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