Yahoo! expands research operations in Spain and Chile

After Google and MSN, Yahoo! is expanding their research and development operations to other countries besides USA. The search engine company is opening its first research labs in Europe and South America. These are to be located in Spain and Chile. This is a major action taken by the company to close in on their biggest rivals Google in search engine technologies.

These new offices would be operational from today and would be headed by recently hired tech expert Ricardo Baeza-Yates. However, the company declined to reveal details on how many people they would be hiring in these new R&D labs. The company as of now employ around workers worldwide.

Company representative Prabhakar Raghavan said in a statement on these new steps taken by the company: “This is an exciting opportunity for Yahoo research to draw on the talent and knowledge across Europe and Latin America”. The company is focusing more and more on researching newer technologies to enhance content indexing and retrieval to make searching more powerful for the end user.

They are still trailing Google in the search engine market with latest estimates placing their market share at around 29.5 percent compared to Google’s 39.8 percent.