Search giant lures away Amazon exec and he is replaced by Intel research director.
The head of Amazon.com Inc.’s online search effort is leaving to join Google Inc., the latest in a series of high-profile hires for the search engine leader.
Udi Manber, who has been chief executive of Amazon.com’s A9 subsidiary, will be a vice president of engineering at Google, spokeswoman Lynn Fox said in a statement. She declined to provide more details, including when he will start and what specifically he will work on.
The search field has become a highly competitive one, with companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and others jockeying for a larger share of the market and the most innovative technologies, in some cases by hiring away each other’s competition.
Last year, Microsoft was involved with Google in a dispute over Google hiring away Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, the vice president of Microsoft’s Natural Interactive Services division, and appointing him as the head of Google’s research and development center in China.
Google’s New Searcher:
Dr. Manber, Google’s new hire from Amazon, was one of the authors of the Agrep string-searching program and the GLIMPSE (global implicit search) text-indexing and retrieval software program. He was formerly a professor at the University of Arizona and wrote a book on computer algorithms.
He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Washington in 1982.
Manber’s defection marks the latest coup for Google, the Mountain View, Calif., based–search engine company that is proving a formidable foe for many technology industry titans.
In September, the company snagged Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf from MCI Inc. Also last fall, Microsoft Corp. and Google waged a court battle over Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee’s decision to resign from Microsoft to oversee Google’s efforts to open a research center in China. That case has since been settled.
Google’s other recent notable hires including longtime Microsoft executive Mark Lucovsky and former eBay Inc. executive Louis Monier, who was also a key player in the development of the first search engine, AltaVista.
Seattle-based Amazon debuted the A9 search service in September 2004 after opening the subsidiary’s Palo Alto, California, office in October 2003 to research and build new search technologies.
A9 provides a toolbar that users can install at the top of their web browser to display their history, bookmarks, a diary of notes that they can enter as they browse the web, along with recommendations of sites that they may want to visit based on past search results.
In January 2005, A9 introduced a yellow pages service with mapping technology that displays street-level images so users can virtually walk streets and view businesses from street level.
Amazon.com’s New Chief:
Amazon.com has appointed a new chief executive, Dr. David Tennenhouse, 48, for its A9.com search unit effective immediately after the former chief, Udi Manber, was coaxed away by Google to become the search giant’s vice president of engineering.
Craig Berman, spokesman for Seattle-based Amazon.com, said.
Amazon hired Dr. Tennenhouse from Intel, where he was vice president of Intel’s corporate technology group and director of research. He formerly worked as director of the information technology office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
At DARPA, Dr. Tennenhouse guided the search program, as well as data mining, information management, machine learning, and distributed computing. He has also worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s department of electrical engineering and computer science, and at the Sloan School of Management.
He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from the University of Toronto and his PhD from the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge.
“I am excited to lead this terrific team of innovators,” said Dr. Tennenhouse. In a short period of time, A9.com has earned a reputation for developing unique and creative solutions to difficult search problems. Our team is committed to making major leaps forward in empowering people to find the information and products they are looking for.
Google is by far the leader in the search engine field, commanding 46.3 percent of the U.S. market according to the latest November data from Nielsen/NetRatings. By comparison, Amazon.com’s A9 ranked 29th, with 0.1 percent of the market.