Names Tao Yang as the Senior VP and Chief Scientist; will drive the development and growth of Ask.com search technologies.

Ask.com today announced that Tao Yang, one of the foremost experts in scalable computing and algorithmic search, has been named Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist.

In his new role, Yang will drive the development and growth of Ask.com search technologies on a global scale, with a key area of focus on continued development of large-scale system infrastructure and classification technologies to deliver the most relevant search experience available for users.

An Ask.com executive since the company acquired Teoma Technologies, Inc. in 2001, Yang is a co-inventor of the ExpertRank search algorithm and having co-led search technology research and development since 2000. With particular expertise in developing revolutionary search algorithms and building supporting infrastructures, Yang has been directly responsible for scaling search architectures and algorithms that handle millions of pages, to giant-scale systems that can handle billions of documents in terms of relevancy, performance, and freshness.

Yang was formerly Chief Scientist and VP of research and development during Teoma's startup stage, and was Chief Scientist and VP of search development at Ask.com.

Steve Berkowitz, Ask.com CEO, said, "Tao has been instrumental in pioneering some of the most important developments in the history of search, particularly in the area of large-scale distributed architectures and algorithms, and we look forward to his continued contributions."