Yahoo has hired a leading Chilean computer scientist to head its first research centres in Europe and Latin America, notching up a victory in the intense global competition for top engineering talent between the leading internet search engines.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates will run research centres in Barcelona and Santiago, the company said. As co-author of Modern Information Retrieval, a widely-used textbook on the subject, he is one of only a handful of academic experts in the field around the world, said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research.