Google Watch - Archive - Yahoo Hires DB Guru to Compete with Google

Yahoo Hires DB Guru to Compete with Google

Written By
Steve Bryant
Steve Bryant
Jul 26, 2006
1 minute read
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Yahoo named on Monday a database guru to study links between computer and human-aided search.

Raghu Ramakrishnan, formerly professor of computer sciences at UW-Madison, is now at Yahoo Research helping the company define its social search strategy.

Yahoo sees social search as a major part of its strategy against Google. Google relies on computer-aided search, but does have some products — such as Google Co-Op — that rely on user expertise.

Yahoo has invested heavily in social search with the acquistion of social bookmarking site del.icio.us and photo sharing site Flickr, both of which use user-generated taxonomies to self-organize data. Yahoo has also developed a service called Yahoo Answers which matches user questions with user answers.

Yahoo’s not the only one making competitive hiring moves. Microsoft recently advertised for a position called “Google compete lead” who will unite all Microsoft’s Google compete iniatives.

Meanwhile, Google’s been steadily poaching Microsoft employees.

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