Leading portal Yahoo to secure human face

Bangalore, Dec 28: Moving the internet space to new heights, leading portal Yahoo will soon lunch products and applications to enable a human to human interface of the web and facilitate tracking search engines more effectively.

Yahoo Research Head Prabhakar Raghavan, on a visit to India, told newsmen here that besides technology researchers, Yahoo had started hiring economists, sociologists and psychologists to understand better the people browsing the internet and come out with suitable product and applications. Internet, which had now become a key utility, should ensure better monetisation for the Company besides enable users tap it effectively.

Yahoo had already hired top notch economists and would continue to do so to give the user community a higher value content.

Chief Operating Officer of Yahoo India Research Pranesh Ananthapur said that the Indian research team was already working out solutions for the mobile users in India and a study had been on use of mobiles by the youth.

With over 500 million visitors Yahoo wanted to provide its users effective data extraction solution from about 12 terabytes of information churned out every day, he added.

Mr Prabhakar said next year Yahoo would hold in Bangalore Big Thinkers India series under which quarterly lectures would be delivered on Science, Technology and the India. Speakers would be acclaimed experts from Yahoo who would share expertise and global perspective of the constantly changing world of technology, online products and communities and the internet space. The lectures would target at academic, scientists and the corporate world besides the media.

The first lecture would be on Community Systems. The world Online to be delivered on January eight by Dr Raghu Ramakrishnan Vice President of Yahoo who was an expert in data mining and had a passion for social search. He had developed data mining techniques that protect individuals privacy.

The other lectures would be on Web Search and online community by Dr Andrew Tomkins on April five, Dr R Preston McAfee on pricing on July 23 and Dr Ricardo Baeza-yates on Web Mining or Wisdom of Crowds on November 26.

UNI