Steve Yegge, an engineer at the Google Kirkland office, recently posted to the Google blog about the Kirkland office’s third birthday. He also announced the opening of an engineering office in Fremont.

Both locations are in the Seattle area — Fremont is just north of downtown and Kirkland is across the floating bridge on the east side (near another company you may have heard of called Microsoft). Yahoo also recently announced the opening of a new engineering office in the Seattle area. Theirs will be in Bellevue, which is also on the east side, near that little-known Redmond company. Both Yahoo and Google have downplayed Microsoft’s potentially recruiting potential (and Yahoo, being the third one in, is downplaying the possibility of recruiting from Google).

Yahoo Senior VP David Sobeski (previously at Microsoft) said to the Seattle PI, “We’re here to build a good presence of engineers. You know what, if Microsoft guys want to come and ask us questions, great. Google guys? Great. We’ll talk to everybody.” Earlier, Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president of engineering, told the PI that Google didn’t set up an office there in order to attract employees from Microsoft. (Although that office certainly has its share of ex-Microsofties.)

Fun fact: the picture in that PI article of the Google office includes me in the corner “brainstorming.” Sadly, the Buffy action figures on my old desk aren’t visible.

Steve’s blog post points out the many Google products to come out of the Kirkland office, and I can’t help but add that Sitemaps grew well beyond its roots into Webmaster Central thanks to the efforts of the Kirkland-based team.

Vanessa Fox ate lots of yummy cake as a Googler during the first and second birthdays of the Kirkland office and wishes them a very happy third.

Confirmed: Yahoo expanding to Microsoft’s backyard from SeattlePi has confirmed reports that Yahoo has signed a lease on Bellevue’s One Twelfth @ Twelfth complex for 115,000 square feet. The new office can potentially fit between 500 to 600 employees.

It appears Yahoo is hiring software engineers for the Bellevue location.

This is Yahoo’s first large presence in Seattle. Google has their Kirkland office and we all know Microsoft’s headquarters is in Seattle.

More coverage can be found at Techmeme.

The Business Standard reports that Yahoo is to open a new research center in Bangalore, India. The research center is to focus on hiring “mentors and partners” for the existing research and development center in Bangalore, that currently employees 700 individuals. The head of Yahoo Research, Prabhakar Raghavan, said; “We have initiated the process of setting up our lab in Bangalore and have started hiring scientists for this unit. There is no time-frame when this centre will start its operations as it depends on the caliber of people we hire and when the centre will be acquire a critical mass of people.”