Yahoo! Labs

» see labs.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I never used Yahoo Labs, because nobody used Yahoo Labs. An industrial research group reaches a computer engineer in Ankara as a PDF with an author list, if it reaches him at all, and by the time I was reading that sort of paper for work the names on the good ones had moved to other companies. The Yahoo I actually touched was mail and messenger, and both of those have their own graves here.

Yahoo Labs employed around two hundred people and its output was papers. The headquarters sat in Sunnyvale. There were rooms in New York, in London and in Haifa, and until early 2015 one in Barcelona. The eleven subjects the organization listed as its research areas ran from information retrieval to optimization and feedback control.

The lineage starts before the name. In July 2005 a group out of the older Yahoo Research Labs organization, including the chief data officer Usama Fayyad along with Prabhakar Raghavan, Andrew Tomkins and Kevin Lang, formed a new research team, and Raghavan was made head of Yahoo Research. That September Ronald Brachman arrived from DARPA, where he had just finished a term running an office, to take over worldwide research operations. Andrei Broder and Ricardo Baeza-Yates joined soon after. Yahoo Labs itself was formed on 4 March 2008, out of a proposal by Brachman and Larry Heck to fold two existing labs into one organization.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

For a stretch in the late 2000s this was a serious industrial research shop, and the reason was mechanical. Yahoo had traffic at a scale almost nobody else had, and traffic is what information retrieval research runs on. A question about how people search, or about what they click on once they have, could be answered at Yahoo against real logs instead of a model of real logs.

In 2012 Brachman took over Labs and became Yahoo's chief scientist, which on paper was the unit at its most senior. The Barcelona lab closed in early 2015. Reading those two facts in that order tells you more about the direction than any announcement did.

~ the fall ~

Fortune's write-up said Labs had been shrinking in size and resources for years, which is the polite industry phrasing for a budget that gets trimmed every planning cycle without anybody having to announce a decision. On 16 February 2016 VentureBeat reported that Brachman and Baeza-Yates, the vice president of research, were both leaving. The restructuring was announced the following day.

~ what replaced it ~

On 17 February 2016 Yahoo said Labs was being shut down and that its research staff would be distributed into the product teams. One independent research group survived under Yoelle Maarek, a vice president of research who had run the Haifa lab, with Ben Shahshahani from advertising science helping lead the integrated side. The whole arrangement was given the name Yahoo Research, and the name was a recycled one: that is what the same organization had been called before Labs existed in 2008, which makes the 2016 announcement a circle rather than a step.

labs.yahoo.com redirects to Yahoo's search page today and research.yahoo.com does the same. There is a research page on yahooinc.com and it is a business overview, with no publication list and no history on it. What is left of the thing itself is the published record. The unit that produced it was dissolved on a Wednesday in February, in a single sentence on a company blog.

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