The front page of today's Wall Street Journal has an article about Yahoo's research lab: Hoping to Overtake Its Rivals, Yahoo Stocks Up on Academics (subscription required).

The article talks about how Yahoo is heavily recruiting academics from economics and computer science departments around the country, to amass a group of world-class researchers to tackle questions like how do you “save attractive women from unwanted solicitations on an Internet dating site.”

In the past year, the company has snagged leading talents in microeconomics, Web search and artificial intelligence from universities such as Cornell and Carnegie Mellon, and industrial labs including those of Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp.

Their goal is to avoid being trumped by Google again. To tempt the researchers, Yahoo offers up its enormous datasets that offer a rich testbed for asking interesting behavior and economic questions. Unlike AOL though, they are trying to keep the private data private:

Yahoo submits all outside requests to look at the data to a review committee. It says it has never provided search-related data to outside researchers.

There are plenty of academic research labs within industry (e.g. my home Sun Labs!), but what makes Yahoo's hiring unusual is the focus on economists. For example, Microsoft Research has 700 researchers and 0 economists. If you have access to the article, I recommend checking it out.