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.
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.
"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.