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Google Gets A9 Search Chief

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the not-often-i-get-read-the-word-nabbed dept.

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'"

5 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Some geeks get the best names. by belmolis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My favorite crazy geek name is "Ransom Love", once CEO of Caldera.

  2. Google found out how to "one-up" Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Instead of just buying the company to "innovate", they can just grab key people and do it without the overhead of figuring out what works/doesn't (they already did) and all those pesky non-star employees.

  3. .. and ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    .. and he was Yahoo's chief searching tech before A9. This guy's a badass, I was lucky enough to have taken a class with him at the UA in '93. Named my cat after him. True story.

  4. Re:Who is Udi Manber? by Otter · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Oh yeah, Harvest! That brings back some mid-90's memories of rainbow horizontal-divider GIF's and animated letter-folding-into-an-envelope mailto icons. Damn it, now I have a Hootie and the Blowfish song stuck in my head!

    Come to think of it, I don't think any of those Harvest search boxes ever once returned anything meaningful.

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  5. Re:Who is Udi Manber? by bburns · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Udi Manber was a professor at the University of Arizona back in the day when Web pages were grey and most of the Web could still be viewed in the text-based browser Lynx. He tortured students (myself included) in classes like Algorithms, his specialty, and Automatas, Grammars, and Languages. Actually, he was pretty level-headed for a university professor. Instead of teaching his students how to recite algorithms and theory from a big cookbook, he taught us how to understand and develop them from scratch--for the most part, that is. One thing I'll never forget is that you never understand proofs of NP-complete reductions, you just get used to them. For more, his book, Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach, is recommended reading.

    Since the University of Arizona was a research institution, he applied his expertise in algorithms to the Web. That was his ticket out of academia into the real world, including stopovers at Yahoo!, A9, (and others?) and now Google. The moral of this little story: useful things can actually come out of academia!