Yoelle Maarek

Yoelle Maarek was born in 1962 in Tunis

Maarek was born on June 1, 1962, in Tunis, and her family moved to France when she was a baby. She grew up in Meudon-La-Foret. Her father Armand was a civil engineer, and her mother Claire volunteered in Zionist groups in France.

In 1985 she completed a degree in applied mathematics and computer science at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. She then began a doctorate at the Technion in programming languages. After a year at Columbia University, where she met the field of search engines, she switched her research to that field and finished her doctorate in 1989.

She joined IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, where she led the team that built the company's first search engine, Guru. In 1993 she returned to Israel and worked at IBM's research lab in Haifa on enterprise search. In 2006 she founded Google's development center in Haifa, where her team launched Google Suggest in 2008.

From 2009 she helped set up Yahoo's research center in Israel, and in 2013 she became head of Yahoo's labs in Israel and India and a vice president. In 2017 she moved to Amazon as Vice President of Worldwide Research for Alexa Shopping. In 2023 she founded the Haifa research center of the Technology Innovation Institute, where she is Chief Researcher of AI/IR.

She is a member of the Technion Board of Governors. She was elected an ACM Fellow in 2013 and joined the US National Academy of Engineering in 2021. She is married to Frank Smadja and has 3 children.