Yoelle Maarek is a Senior Director at Yahoo! Research in Haifa, Israel, which she joined in June 2009.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Yoelle was the Director of Google Haifa Engineering Center, in Israel, which she opened in July 2006. One of the most visible achievements of her team is "Google Suggest", a query completion feature that has been deployed on google.com since August 2008 and is available in a series of Google properties, from YouTube, iGoogle to Mobile Search. Prior to this, Yoelle had been with IBM Research since 1989. While with IBM Research she held a series of technical and management appointments first at the T.J. Watson Research in New York, USA, and then at the IBM Haifa Research Lab in Israel until 2006. Her two last positions were Distinguished Engineer and Department Group Manager in the area of search and collaboration. She graduated from the "Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees" in Paris, France, and received her DEA (graduate degree) in Computer Science from Paris VI University, both in 1985. Yoelle obtained her PhD in CS from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in January 1989.