Sunnyvale based Yahoo Inc. announced on Thursday the hiring of Prabhakar Raghavan, a former IBM researcher, to develop certain areas for Yahoo including search and information navigation, social media, community, personalization and mobility.

“The appointment of Prabhakar into this key role at Yahoo! indicates the significant degree of importance Yahoo! is placing on research,” said Terry Semel, chief executive officer of Yahoo!. “Prabhakar is highly accomplished and respected in the research community, and we look forward to continuing to expand our research efforts to build the technical and scientific foundation we need to ensure the best possible experience for our users on the Internet.”

Raghavan’s job as Head of Research at Yahoo will allow him to push further his research interests. Those interests, state on his website include:

Information retrieval and text/web mining
Combinatorial optimization and randomized algorithms
Semi-structured querying

Besides his Yahoo gig, Raghavan is professor of computer science at Stanford. He did his undergrad work at IIT, Madras and got his PhD at Berkeley. His job prior to Yahoo was chief technology officer and senior vice president at Verity Inc, who had lured him away from IBM. He also is editor of the Journal of Association for Computer Machinery.

He should make an excellent fit for Yahoo as he’s even written a textbook on algorithms called “Randomized Algorithms,” has has published over 100 papers on the field even has patents.

“My goal for Yahoo! Research is to continue to attract preeminent scientists from around the world to help discover new technologies that will enhance Yahoo services that will change the lives of hundreds of millions of users around the globe,” said Raghavan. “Yahoo!’s vast network offers opportunities for scientists and research that few companies in the world can offer.”

John Stith is a staff writer for webproworld covering technology and business.