Google Gets A9 Search Chief

award tour writes "Red Herring has a story that Google has nabbed yet another high ranking employee from a competitor. Udi Manber, former CEO of A9, has joined Google as vice president of engineering. As slashdot readers would know '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'"

Comments

Who is Udi Manber?

[soboroff]

Not that it's so hard to hunt up his homepage(s), but the summary is that Udi Manber was a very big name in web search before web search became big business. He wrote agrep, Glimpse, Harvest, and other nifty things.

This is a different kind of hire than snagging that guy from Microsoft.

Re:should not that be th eother way around?

[AnotherDaveB]

One would think that search is Google's core competetency so there is little in getting the other guy to learn from him and his ways.

A9 grew out of Alexa. Cringely interviewed Alexa's founder who pointed out a difference in Alexa's and Google's approach

So Google is - uses as a ranking mechanism how many people link to an article. .... Alexa was also based around meta data. It was people who visited this site also visited this site. ... So using people's trails as a mechanism of finding what's important out of the net.

So perhaps pagerank will be / is informed by analysing individual websurfers?

Amazon (who own A9/Alexa) use the same technology to suggest purchase Recommendations to you.

Re:Left As An Exercise For The Reader

[SurgeonGeneral]

Udi Manber is definately a geek.