Microsoft India R and D, which currently has a development centre in Hyderabad, announced the expansion of its activities to Bangalore on Thursday.
The Bangalore team will focus on product development and applied research in web search and online ad technologies.
"It will initially have 200 plus employees, vast majority of whom would transition to Microsoft from Yahoo! as part of the Microsoft-Yahoo! Search alliance", Satya Nadella, senior vice president, R and D, Online Services Division, Microsoft told reporters in Bangalore.
"The Bangalore centre joins Hyderabad as one of the core hubs of development and research for OSD. The innovations from our Hyderabad team are already having significant impact on our US, UK, Canada, Australia and India products. The combined skills and talent of our existing OSD team at Hyderabad and the Yahoo! employees who join us now in Bangalore will enhance India's contribution to our OSD innovation charter inclusive of Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Ad Centre", he said.
"We are confident that once the transition is completed, the companies' unified search market place will deliver even greater and improved innovation for consumers, better volume and efficiency for advertisers and better monetization opportunities for web publishers", Satya said.
Of the 400 Yahoo employees taken, 200 were from India. This team would work together to build up a great technology footprint. While Yahoo would continue to build on the search engine experience, Microsoft technology would build the Technology. It will provide the index, the crawls.
Satya said a study revealed 50 per cent of time was spent on long queries and 60 per cent of sessions take four queries or more. The search was in terms of task completion.
In this context, the impact of this alliance for lay users would translate into better search results, whether they log onto Yahoo search or MSN Bing. The underlining search engine would be the same driving both searches. The alliance will help users leverage the combined strength of Microsoft and Yahoo and to expand their search experience results, he said.
It would also help advertisers who had to choose Yahoo, MSN and Google come to one market place to advertise products. It would significantly benefit users and advertisers and help in being competitive, he said when asked about the alliance impact in terms of competition from Google.
On MSN Bing, Microsoft's new redesigned web search engine, he said it had received some great early momentum in the US and efforts are on to develop some India specific features in offering local content.
This offering would be in terms of harvesting structured information like local events happening in a city and throw up structured results. It would also be working with local content developers for this, he said.
Both Hyderabad and Bangalore centres will grow and both would have top talents contributing to OSD, he said.
On the contribution of Microsoft India team, Microsoft India R&D MD Srini Koppolu said the team had been contributing in terms af adding core algo relevance, developing structured data and building page search advertising technology.
