In a historic move to beat Google in competition, Internet media company Yahoo declared of its plans to expand its research and engineering base in Spain and Chile with new Research Centers. With these research centers, Yahoo is moving out of US for the first time. 

Over the past year yahoo has expanded its R&D efforts especially in the fields of web search as well as other technology areas. They currently have six research facilities, four in the United States and one center each in Europe and Latin America.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has hired the specialized services of Ricardo Baeza-Yates, world renowned web retrieval and data mining expert. He will be based in Barcelona and report directly to Yahoo’s research head, Prabhakar Raghvan. Baeza-Yates has been affiliated with universities in both Santiago and Barcelona. He has co-authored books like Modern Information Retrieval, the most used textbook on Internet search being just one of his many masterpiece books.

The Santiago based new Yahoo office will be run in conjunction with the Center for Web Research (CWR), founded by Baeza-Yates. The center is currently funded by the Millennium Scientific Initiative of Chile's Planning Ministry. The Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Chile will be hosting the research.

Similarly, the Barcelona office will be run in conjunction with the Center for Innovation Barcelona Media. It is a non-profit institution that runs on local industry and Catalan government support. It also has an alliance with Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and other local colleges.

Yahoo’s biggest web search rival Google has four U.S. research centers and similar facilities in Switzerland, India and Japan.