Yahoo! hires former IBM researcher Prabhakar Raghavan

Looks like Search Engine companies are on a hiring spree currently. Microsoft just lost one of their most brilliant minds to Google and they are now charging the leaders in web searching market with a lawsuit. And Yahoo! has gained the services of another brilliant mind in the form of Prabhakar Raghavan who was once a senior researcher at IBM (International Business Machines Corporation).

The company has named Prabhakar as the head of Yahoo! Research as they have been struggling to keep up with the pace of the competition from Google. Microsoft has also taken big initiatives in the recent times and with the arrival of Windows Vista can become a major player in the search engine market.

Raghavan is now expected to lead the company in the research of key areas for Yahoo! Some of these include search and information navigation, social media, community, personalization, and mobility. He was until now working as the senior vice president and chief technology officer at Verity Inc., which develops enterprise search software. Before that, Prabhakar has also worked as the former head of the Computer Science Principles department at IBM’s Almaden Research Center.