Yahoo names new head of ’emerging search’

Yahoo has hired Dr. Andrei Broder as research fellow and vice president of emerging search technology in the Sunnyvale, California, company’s research division.

Broder, who previously worked with search pioneer AltaVista and with IBM, has been entrusted with “finding new and more relevant ways to search the Web,” Yahoo said in a press release on Friday.

At IBM Research, Broder held the post of distinguished engineer and chief technology officer of the Institute for Search and Text Analysis.

Before his stint at IBM, he was vice president for research and chief scientist at AltaVista. He obtained his PhD in computer science from Stanford University.

Broder has studied how to eliminate duplicate Web pages, and has worked on mapping the Web. He has published more than 70 papers and has been awarded 20 patents. He chairs the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.) Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing and was recently named a 2006 IEEE Fellow.

It is generally accepted that while search engines have become significantly better in recent years, there is still much to do in order to improve the user experience of finding information on the Web.

Toward that end, established players in the search market, such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, as well as startups such as Blinkx, are continually exploring and testing ways to make it easier and more intuitive for users to locate information online.

At the same time, search services continue to increase beyond general Web search into more specific areas, such as local-business search, access to search engines from mobile devices, multimedia content search, product search, geospatial mapping search, desktop search and blog search, to mention just a few.

In the race to provide the best search services, companies such as Yahoo are putting significant muscle behind their research efforts, hoping that the work done in those laboratories will lead to innovations they can use to give their services an edge over the competition.