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Database guru to head Yahoo research team

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CIOL Bureau
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SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo

Inc
., the world's largest Internet media company, on Monday hired Raghu

Ramakrishnan, 45, a top academic database expert as vice president and Yahoo

research fellow. He will be in charge of defining the strategy behind Yahoo's

"social search" system and has been hired on his expertise in

databases, data-mining and privacy-preserving technologies.

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Social search -- a broad effort to enhance computerized Web- search tools

with insights gained from mining the collective knowledge of its users -- is the

linchpin of Yahoo's strategy to compete with rival Google Inc., which has

focused heavily on advances in computerized search.

"At Yahoo you have this unique opportunity to integrate conventional

search with Flickr, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Groups and Yahoo

Mail," Ramakrishnan said, listing Yahoo's services that centre on human

contributions. "How do you take all this search activity and learn from

it?"

Ramakrishnan was for nearly 20 years a computer science professor at the

University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a co-founder of the university's Data

Mining Institute. He is co-author of the widely read text, Database Management

Systems, and has published over 150 research papers in his career.

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"How do you make all of this (search activity) as natural as possible to

users? There is a big gap between the two subjects," Ramakrishnan said.

In 1999, he co-founded and served as chairman and chief technology officer of

QUIQ, a company that pioneered online question-answering communities and

collaborative customer Web self-service for companies such as Business Objects,

Compaq and Sun Microsystems Inc.

Ramakrishnan will be based at Yahoo's research facility near its Sunnyvale,

California headquarters and will report to the head of Yahoo Research, Prabhakar

Raghavan.

He holds an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)

at Madras and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He chairs the

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Management

of Data, is a fellow of the ACM and recipient of the David and Lucile Packard

Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering.

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