Bangalore: The Chief Strategy Officer and the head of Yahoo Labs, Prabhakar Raghavan is leaving the internet giant, after leading the Company’s research and development strategies for seven years that brought him huge respect within the company.

He will be taking a job at the company’s long term rival, Google, as reported by All Things D. Raghavan was in charge of long term research division of Yahoo, which is expecting a possible deep cut under the leadership of CEO Scott Thompson.

The company said in a statement, “Yahoo! thanks Prabhakar Raghavan for his dedication and contributions to Yahoo! for the past 7 years. We wish him well in his next endeavor. Ash Munshi, CTO, will assume leadership for Y! Labs.”

Before working at Yahoo, he worked at IBM research. He is also a consulting professor at Stanford University and has co-authored 2 books on information retrieval and randomized algorithms.

At Yahoo, his research area has been extensive ranging from algorithms to data mining to search. No further information about his role in Google is available, but the company is expected to gain from his experience in the search market.

Raghavan had been appointed as the head of strategy by former CEO Carol Bartz, who was fired following the protests from the investors over not taking the company to the right direction.