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Yahoo research centre in Israel

Web search company Yahoo Inc.said on Tuesday it has launched a new research lab in Israel, its first in the region.

The research lab in the northern port city of Haifa will be led by Ronny Lempel, an information organisation and retrieval expert. He previously worked at the Information Retrieval Group at IBM's Haifa Research Lab, focusing on research and development for enterprise search systems.

The lab, which opened on Tuesday, will focus on simplifying complex technology problems in searching the Web, Yahoo said.

Rival Google opened its second R&D centre in Israel in June. Its Israeli centres are in Tel Aviv, Israel's financial and cultural centre, and Haifa.

"Search is still in its infancy," Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research, said in a statement. "At Yahoo, we are working on the hard core science that can lead to search experiences that are significantly beyond the current art." (Reporting by Tova Cohen, editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)