Now the News has been announced that Raghu is joining Yahoo Research. The News.com piece says:
Yahoo hired Raghu Ramakrishnan, 45, as vice president and Yahoo research fellow in charge of defining the strategy behind Yahoo’s “social search” system, based on his expertise in databases, data-mining and privacy-preserving technologies.
Social search–a broad effort to enhance computerized Web- search tools with insights gained from mining the collective knowledge of its users–is the linchpin of Yahoo’s strategy to compete with rival Google, which has focused heavily on advances in computerized search.
“At Yahoo you have this unique opportunity to integrate conventional search with Flickr, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Mail,” Ramakrishnan said, listing Yahoo’s services that center on human contributions. “How do you take all this search activity and learn from it?”
Raghu is a talented person and will definitely make a difference.