Yahoo Labs head Prabhakar Raghavan leaves (and joins Google) | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Labs head Prabhakar Raghavan leaves (and joins Google)

allthingsd.com

78 pointsplinkplonk9 comments

Does anyone have insight into whether the new Yahoo CEO is looking to cut Yahoo Labs / Yahoo Research? Their have traditionally been a strong information retrieval and data mining research powerhouse, but with the outsourcing of Yahoo Search's ranking algorithms to Bing, I would be worried about how Yahoo Labs can position themselves now.

Yahoo Research should have a big role to play in the company's future if Thompson was serious about yahoo being a data company. They work on lots of interesting ad matching / targeting tech. Thompson can't be that stupid, can he? I can't understand how Prabhakar couldn't be retained. Yahoo Research is the best non-google ML lab, and by far the best that shares any output; they produce world class research. None of the people there will have any problem landing on their feet; the employees there work for yahoo by choice. And from my discussions with friends at Y Research, Prabhakar is highly respected by his employees.

When I was there (and this was a while ago) I felt like they were more focused on emitting papers than helping us get anything done.

A part of that is because the charter of Labs is (was?) to generate papers and provide exposure to the company. It helps to attract talent if you're presenting at large conferences about the interesting problems you're working on.

How does MSR stack up for ML? For computer vision, MSR is far better than Y Research, so I'm surprised it would be very different for ML.

Looks like the deeper cuts, in his division and more broadly, are confirmed: http://allthingsd.com/20120305/yahoos-new-ceo-preps-major-re...

Y! had "Labs"?! Seriously, there hasn't been enything innovative from Y! in years (or maybe I just overlooked it?).

Don't know if that's good or bad news for G. But since they messed up their UX after MM was removed, I guess this is the logical next step.

Please enlighten me. What has been coming out of those "Labs" recently? I was honestly surprised hearing that there is still reseach going on at Y! Didn't they usually buy companies to innovate?

Here you go: http://labs.yahoo.com/publications

Yahoo Labs people regularly win "best paper" awards at top conferences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com