There is an interesting discussion of The Hindu publication with Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of the research at Yahoo! on Search engine strategies.

According to Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo is focusing more on fulfilling the user requirements rather than surfing the user in the universe. The statement by Raghavan makes it clear “We do not want to give users 10 matching documents but actually craft an experience that fulfills a need.”

For search engine technologies you don’t only require Computer science engineers but also the experts from other technologies too like economists and sociologists.

Dr. Raghavan also cleared some points about the Yahoo’s India development Center. Various Yahoo! projects are being developed in India like e-mail and Instant messaging software’s and Data mining centers to improve user experience.  Another big project is safe-image searching feature which will help safe browsing experience by image analysis and filtering.

When it comes to build a research organization, India lags behind. “Building a research organization has its challenges. In Bangalore, we have an advanced technology group. We don’t have a research group there since it is very hard to find researchers in India. The US produces 1,400 Ph.Ds a year in Computer Science, China produces 3,000, Israel has 50. India has only 30 a year.” - Dr. Raghavan.

In India we have advanced technology and engineering groups which work closely with scientists to build up experiments. India is hoping to get mature in research and want to close the gap between requirement and supply.