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Spain and Chile receive the first Yahoo research offices in Europe and South America, as the company attempts to chase down Google in the search market.

Yahoo will open research labs in Spain and Chile. To facilitate their development, Yahoo hired Ricardo Baeza-Yates from Chile's Center for Web Research to oversee the operations in Santiago and Barcelona, where he will be based, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported.

Google has run ahead of Yahoo in search algorithm performance, an area the company needs to see improve even as it rolls out relevance tweaks aimed at improving online ad performance.

Baeza-Yates co-authored a textbook called "Modern Information Retrieval." with Berthier Ribeiro-Neto. The book solidified his place as one of a handful of academics globally who have such search expertise, Yahoo Research head Prabhakar Raghavan said in the article.

Yahoo's hiring of Baeza-Yates follows other high-profile hirings made by Yahoo Research. Andrew Tomkins from IBM, Andrei Broder from AltaVista, and Ron Brackman, former head of the Information Processing Technology Office at DARPA, all preceded Baeza-Yates in joining Yahoo, the report said.

Google has an assortment of equally high-profile hirings, including that of Vint Cerf, generally considered the father of the Internet, and Kai-Fu Lee, who Google fought for in court against Microsoft in a case that was eventually settled confidentially to enable Lee to work for Google in China.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.