Rumors about Google's intention to start R&D activity in Russia have been circulating in the industry since last year. Though the company did not comment on them, our sources confirmed two months ago that the company was preparing to open its engineering center in the country.

The number of employees to work in the new center has not yet been set. The company 'will recruit as many first class engineers as they can find.'

Burkov, the new center head, is a former research physicist who moved to the U.S. from Russia in 1990 and has worked at both Cornell and the University of Wisconsin. He co-founded three companies, Bilbo Innovations (computer pedals), Invincible Data Systems (e-mail and disk encryption, access control and video-streaming encryption utilities developer acquired by Vasco Data Security) and Dulance, Burkov's latest project.

Dulance is a search and price comparison engine for the goods sold over the Web. The service is able to automatically collect the data from Web-sites extracting from their pages the names, descriptions and prices of the goods into its database. Potential competitors of Dulance, including Google's Froogle, use a different mechanism with which merchants have to manually upload specifically formatted data.

Until recent Burkov was the CEO of Dulance, and the history of his transfer to Google seems a big mystery. A couple of weeks ago Dulance Web-site was shut down.