Btw, this is one of the areas where Yahoo! has a lot of success. Yahoo! Research in its current form exists for around 5 years, but it has already surpassed MIT.
For a starter, this is a very small subset of computer science conferences (e.g., the main software engineering and programming language conferences are missing). I'm not sure in which field Yahoo! Research works (looks like data mining), but in SE and PL, they are inexistent.
Best paper awards are just one metric among many. Citations, venue impact factor, number of publications are other (imperfect) metrics. It's probably fair to say that MIT and other big universities and corporate labs (IBM and Microsoft) have high scores in all of these metrics, whereas Yahoo! Research is still too young and too small to compete with even smaller but dynamic universities w.r.t. these metrics.
Lifshits is a research scientist at Y!R.
I wonder what long-term effects this will have on the computer field and on computer science research at universities.
Regarding "buying brains", being at Y!R is a great experience for me and it matches all the perks of being in academia (you can publish almost anything, work with students, teach at universities if you want, etc).