Yahoo! is a cult brand, and if anyone is interested in inventing the Internet of the future, there is no better choice than coming to Yahoo!, feels Shouvick Mukherjee, vice-president and CEO, Yahoo! India R&D. ?Simply because the impact one can directly make to a large Internet user base.? Shouvick moved to Bangalore from Sunnyvale in 2003 and he brings rich experience in Internet product and technology development. He has played key leadership roles in Yahoo! US and Bangalore to lead multiple products and technology areas like data systems, advertising systems, listing and media products. In an interaction with Sudhir Chowdhary, Mukherjee discusses the recent trends in the Internet space and activities of the Bangalore R&D centre. Excerpts:

What kind of work is being done out of the Yahoo! Bangalore centre?

Yahoo! India R&D was established around 10 years back in Bangalore and has successfully emerged as an innovation hub for Yahoo! globally. Its mission is to drive product and technology innovations that create a significant business impact for Yahoo! globally. And we have been very successful at that.

The Bangalore centre has undertaken end-to-end development of 20 odd products for global, regional and local markets. We now account for one-third of the IP produced for Yahoo! globally. We expanded our scope overtime, and our teams today work on resolving the entire range of internet and technology challenges. We have built a cross functional team that cuts across search, advertising, media, listings, platforms, user experience, service engineering. Additionally, we also have a Yahoo! Labs team as part of the centre, which focuses on next-generation innovations with a strong foundation of sciences.

Some of recent product innovations include OMG, celebrity news and gossip site. The site is seeing tremendous traction, operating across Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico and India. Our engineers worked on OMG and could manage to create this product in less than 6 months. Yahoo! Cricket is yet another example which the team in Bangalore worked on, and it?s a category leader now. Other technology innovations include ?NGD Marketplace?, a predictive Ad exchange. It predicts click and conversion probability estimation for display Ads based on the nature of users and the kind of Advertisement on display. UGC Cloud is yet another example that allowed our products to become extremely scalable.

Is Yahoo! still focused on search?

Yahoo!?s 50% revenue comes from search, thus it?s an integral part of our growth strategy. We continue to innovate and invest on search technology. However, our approach to search is different. We want to go beyond 10 blue links that traditional search offers. This is one of the reasons we did the deal with Microsoft. We will have them manage the back-end where we focus more on user experience. We want to redefine the whole experience and organise content in the way user will find it useful.

One of the things we are doing is what we call ?Vertical Internet Search?. The goal of Vertical Intent Search is to tailor the search experience to the intent of the search, in key verticals like product, local etc. So for instance, if somebody searches on ?cannon cameras?, then we may show information on various models, their features, prices, and reviews for the camera. A different vertical could be local, and so a query for a restaurant could trigger the address, phone number, ratings, reviews, category, and food images for the restaurant. In general, the idea here is to surface proprietary Yahoo! content from a vertical like product, local as part of Web search results. The system first detects the query intent and subsequently triggers a direct display result which is assembled by culling the most relevant data from the vertical.

Do you have a technology that can prevent or filter pornographic content and images on the Web?

Online pornography is a serious concern for the specific group of users who are prone to viewing this content. Currently 12% of the total websites on Internet have pornographic content. We have recently developed a technology called offensive content analysis, in Banaglore that detects and filters out offensive images. It leverages body part and face detection technology along with a number of additional features like texture, colour, and text to detect pornographic and adult content. The system is currently being used to filter pornographic content for Yahoo’s Image Search product. It is also part of the Big Brother platform where it is used to screen images shown on various Yahoo! properties and user generated content. In benchmarks with competitors, our OCA system was able to identify 2.7% more offensive images while incurring 2.5% fewer errors in the identified images.

Is there a good talent pool in India for R&D? Which are the other important areas which require domain expertise?

Yahoo! is a cult brand, and if one is interested in inventing the Internet of the future, there is no better choice than coming to Yahoo!, simply because the impact one can directly make to a large Internet user base, to the tune of 600 million visitors that come to Yahoo!. It?s not been difficult for Yahoo! to attract talent because of what we call WOW (Work, Opportunity, and Workplace). The sheer quality and scale of our work, combined with opportunities to contribute across the Internet spectrum is a compelling value proposition. Further, we have a workplace environment that is chilled out, and people are encouraged to pursue their passion in life.

We do sometimes face challenges in finding senior architects and domain experts, primarily because the pool in India is small. Thus, we are now taking a leading role in developing an ecosystem in India that is conducive for product development. In this regard, we recently conducted a product camp in Bangalore to spread awareness about exciting career paths in the area of product architecture, design, management.

How are you building the innovation ecosystem at Yahoo! India?

As one of world?s leading technology company, it is our conscious endeavour to develop the ecosystem wherever we operate. We are actively engaged in developing the product innovation ecosystem in India. On one side we are working with Yahoo! developer network where developer community is encouraged to build applications on Yahoo! platforms. We also work actively with industry bodies like Nasscom to expand the pool of product talent in India. We have deep partnerships with campuses too.

But what is Yahoo! India R&D?s contribution for the parent company?

Yahoo! India R&D has become the second largest centre for Yahoo! globally, largest outside of the US. As part of the company?s distributed development strategy, we have played a key role in reducing time to market for number of our products.