(hat tip: solzaire)

Arnab’s Law of Information Retrieval: Every famous researcher in Information Retrieval will eventually be hired by Google, Yahoo! Research, or Microsoft Research :)

While Yahoo’s execs are throwing in the towel for search, I’m quite impressed by the research momentum the Y company is building up. And now they get Prof. Ricardo Baeza Yates on board as head of the new Y!Research Spain/Chile.

That brings the tally of Yahoo Research Locations to:

• Pasadena (the Overture office, afaik Dr. Pennock sits here)
• Bangalore (not really Y!R, but there is an R&D group here)
• Berkeley
• Santa Clara
• New York
• Burbank
• Barcelona
• Santiago

I’ve met Prof. Yates, he’s a really awesome guy. Looking forward to some interesting search query log work from him :)