Large Turnout for Future of Web Search Workshop

The beautiful city of Barcelona was the setting for a workshop program on the future of Web search that drew a crowd of close to 150 people from seventeen countries. Held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra on May 19 -20, the event was co-organized by Yahoo! Research and the Web Research Group of the Department of Technology at the university.

There were two keynote speakers for the workshop: Andrei Broder from Yahoo! Research and Gerhard Weikum from the Max Planck Institute in Germany. In total, there were 24 presentations with topics ranging from Web search to Web mining, including link analysis and usage mining. Two sessions dealt with structured retrieval and search in other environments such as mobile phones or peer-to-peer networks. The energy level at the meeting was very high, with a lot of lively discussion and excitement about a possible follow-up workshop next year.

The highlight of the event for Yahoo! Research was a ribbon-cutting ceremony led by Ron Brachman, Yahoo!’s VP of Worldwide Research Operations, and Javier Rodriguez Zapatero, Managing Director, Yahoo! Spain. The ceremony marked the opening of the Yahoo! Research lab in Barcelona and brought together members of the Yahoo! Research team from around the world.