India is an innovation hub for Yahoo!'

Could you please elaborate on Yahoos activities in India on R&D?

India is an innovation hub for Yahoo! globally. It is the second largest facility for Yahoo! and we have 2,000 employees, rapidly growing y-o-y. The India R&D is involved in developing some of the biggest advertising products with lots of co-development happening.

What are some of the cloud based initiatives you have undertaken?

Our cloud approach is open source and we further that cause. Our work is on the cloud fabric and distributed services like the Zoo Keeper, which is a distributed computing environment wherein different parts of an application run simultaneously across thousands of machines. Another instance is a language called PIG that is used by many companies that run large structured queries on data that resides on thousands of machines. With PIG, we are creating infrastructure to support ad-hoc analysis of very large data sets. Parallel processing is the name of the game.

You have launched a new initiative called Search Direct. Could you tell us how unique is that?

The rationale behind Search Direct is that searchers dont usually care about thousands of results out of every search query. They are looking at relevant user-specific queries and not generic ones. Search Direct is the next step in offering specific answers to the users search queries.

With all these initiatives, where is Yahoo!

heading?

The Bengaluru teams have created significant value. It is now providing intelligent options for the digital advertising for maximized recall. The technologies developed are providing real-time data to advertisers globally, who appropriately position their services to the right target audience that is most relevant to them. With examples like this, at Yahoo! our mission is to make it the worlds premier digital media company. We are not just talking about searchit has to be meaningful search and beyond. Our state-of-the-art products together with measurable, real-time services for the advertisers help them capitalize on the whole lot of relevant data and optimize on their ad spend.