Yahoo expansion

Yahoo in India

Yahoo Inc., based in Sunnyvale, US, has 1,000-plus engineers working in its Bangalore R&D centre â€” about 20 per cent of its engineering workforce worldwide. Yahooâ€™s co-founder and chief David Filo was in Bangalore recently to open a new R&D facility. He spoke to BWâ€™s Nelson Vinod Moses on the companyâ€™s plans for India. Excerpts:

How can you beat Google in search in India?
Filo: In India there are certain areas where we are strong in. In places where we are behind, in order to compete in search in India we need to change the game. There are some of the things we are considering like Yahoo Answers (social search). It is not a substitute for search, but it is a substitute for some of it. We have to invest in areas like those which will help turn around the game completely in web search.

We are looking at it across the board in terms of local search. In terms of you sitting Bangalore and me sitting in California getting the same search results is ridiculous. The whole personalisation around the locality, life or community is all the important things that we are looking at.

In India would you be looking at a differentiated search engine to compete with Google?
Filo: Absolutely, as I said if in certain markets if we were behind at a certain point, you really have to change the game. You cant just put out what you already have cause today if we look at our products versus, we are similar to Google, we are close, but if your behind then being close is not good enough, even being slightly ahead is not good enough. We have to think about changing the game.

In India for search as an overall priority for the company is important for us. The local team here has a task on how to win search, and how can we differentiate in India.

What is the focus for the Bangalore R&D team?
Filo: We have asked Bangalore to focus more on the emerging markets (Bangalore is the centre of excellence for emerging markets) and be fully responsible for emerging markets. Initially the Bangalore centre worked in conjunction with the engineers in the US and then slowly started moving stuff here. Sharad (new CEO of R&D for India) is working on all the stuff that goes into Yahoo India like the Our City for example. He's also responsible for developing products in the emerging markets; if we were going to develop products for the Philippines then it's his responsibility. Products like mail, messenger, groups, etc, they need to be localised and tweaked. Sport sites are one such example of localisation, baseball maybe popular in US, but it is not the same in India or elsewhere.

What excites you about Yahoo R&D India?
Filo: We have a 1,000 plus people and have crossed the point of critical mass and now we should start expecting lots of exciting things from them. We did not know where we will end up with Bangalore five or six years ago, originally we were thinking about the fact that this was a great way to tap into talent, to move away from the Bay Area where things are really competitive and it is hard to hire engineering talent. I did not think of it this way but we are approaching 20 per cent of our engineering workforce here in Bangalore. We should be getting lots of return, innovation and great products from here.
It is hard to find a product within Yahoo or engineering skill set that is not represented in India.

When will you see Our City (city specific channel that was built in India) being rolled out globally?
Filo: Some people are starting to think about it. But it is hard to say when it will be rolled out. Different products have taken different paths, like Yahoo Answers kicked off in the Korea and then went to US and now its here.

Are there any other applications that have been developed in India that can work globally?
Filo: In the US our Maps technology is based on flash but in India it runs on Ajax. We could consider taking Ajax (for maps) to the US and maybe adapt it across the board. In general this is typical of Bangalore, where technology gets developed here and the perhaps used across the world. But there's some stuff around SMS that might work globally.

What are the technical challenges with making sure that applications work on the cheapest phone? Would you consider SMS search?
Filo: We have a number of SMS products that includes search. I know that folks here are working on SMS based stuff that we don't have anywhere else in the world

Are you looking at SaaS (software-as-a-service)?
Filo: We have apps, we have not decided to do a word processor or a spread sheet, and we have looked at over the years and continue to look at. We don't intend to put something out in the market, there's so much that we can focus our resources on, it is not our core competency. So the question is should we go into a whole new area or do we focus on what we are doing right now. We will continue to evaluate it but right now the focus is not on web apps.

Would you look at buying versus build in India?
Filo: Yes, we do look at that everywhere across the board. If there are companies that make sense here we will look at it.
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