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

Left As An Exercise For The Reader

[American AC in Paris]

Given:

1. Constant X = The sentence "How'd you like to be a Vice President at Google?"
2. Variable Y = A geek

Prove:

X + Y = "Hell, yes!" for all values of Y.

Re:Left As An Exercise For The Reader

[SurgeonGeneral]

Udi Manber is definately a geek.

Some geeks get the best names.

[Caspian]

First, there was "Havoc Pennington". And now there is "Udi Manber". That sounds... I donno, it sounds kind of like the secret identity of a superhero from some funkadelic Blade Runner future...

Re:Some geeks get the best names.

[Anonymous Coward]

MOE: Moe's Tavern.
BART: I'm looking for an Udi. Udi Manber.
MOE: (shouting to bar patrons) Uhh, Udi Manber? Hey guys, has anyone found Udi Manber?!
PATRONS: (laughing)
BARNEY: No, keep looking for it! (Laughing)
MOE: Why, you-- (into phone) The next time I see you I'm going to (random threats)
BART: (laughing, hangs up)

Re:Some geeks get the best names.

[belmolis]

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

IT company employee trading

[msbmsb]

So how long until we start seeing "IT Company Employee" trading cards? It sounds like these guys are being moved around like baseball players.

"Hey, I got Kai-Fu Lee's Bachelor's card!" "Cool, but you know after he got traded to Google, his publication stats tanked."

Coaxing

[Billosaur]

Amazon.com has appointed a new chief executive, David Tennenhouse, 48, for its A9.com search unit after the former chief, Udi Manber, was coaxed away by Google to become the search giant's vice president of engineering.

Here chief execuuuutive, gooood chief execuuuutive... come to Google... we've got some nice carrots for youuuuuuuu... C'mon, that's it...

What I'd Like to Know...

[garrett714]

Are all of A9's chairs still intact?

betamatrix.google.com

[Tackhead]

> 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'

In other news, images.google.com just added a new feature: object recognition. In the beta version, pictures of tanks (and irregular patches of colors ranging from #FF0000 through #CC3333) can be automatically recognized by software. In the production version just released last month, server-side digital reconstruction is employed to restore the areas of photographs that had formerly been obscured by such objects.

"Whoa. We know Kai-Fu."

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:Who is Udi Manber?

[Otter]

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.

Re:Who is Udi Manber?

[bburns]

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!

Google found out how to "one-up" Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Like Apple

[4D6963]

It seems that Google follows the path of our beloved Steve Jobs by looking for the best hires. I see that as a big common point between Google and Apple actually, smart people hiring lots of even smarter people.

Sounds like it's the magic formula in the IT world.

Re:Like Apple

[4D6963]

Maybe, but as Steve Jobs pointed out in the past, it's more specific to the IT world. The Good Hire/Bad Hire ratio must be at the highest in this world

Tricksy headhunters!

[Tackhead]

> My employees, stolen!!!oneone

Precious is gone. No precious. Stolen from us! Wicked tricksy headhunters, alwaysss after our precious! Stealing them with offerses of cafffeteriasses full of ruined fisshes! We ought to wring their filthy little necks! Throw chairses at them them! Fucking kill them all!

Hmmm...

[Otter]

So, does he still get his A9 discount at Amazon? Or did Google have to kick him another billion dollars in stock (which he'll sell, prompting another story from Zonk about how this demonstrates Google management's commitment to their company's future) to make up for the extra 3% he'll be paying for O'Reilly books?

.. and ...

[Anonymous Coward]

.. 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.

Udi's a smart guy

[TFoo]

I never understood why he was CEO at A9...he's definitely a scientist and *not* a CEO type. I assumed that the weird A9-is-a-company-but-really-part-of-Amazon thing allowed him to do it: but I can't imagine it was the best use of him.

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.

Udi Man?

[Gorimek]

No, You the man!!

(I bet he's sick of that joke...)