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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'"

14 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Left As An Exercise For The Reader by American+AC+in+Paris · · Score: 5, Funny
    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.

    --

    Obliteracy: Words with explosions

    1. Re:Left As An Exercise For The Reader by SurgeonGeneral · · Score: 3, Informative

      Udi Manber is definately a geek.

      --
      -- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
  2. IT company employee trading by msbmsb · · Score: 5, Funny

    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."

  3. Coaxing by Billosaur · · Score: 4, Funny
    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...

    --
    GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
  4. What I'd Like to Know... by garrett714 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Are all of A9's chairs still intact?

  5. Who is Udi Manber? by soboroff · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. 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!

  6. Like Apple by 4D6963 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.

    --
    You just got troll'd!
  7. Tricksy headhunters! by Tackhead · · Score: 4, Funny
    > 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!

  8. Hmmm... by Otter · · Score: 3, Funny

    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?

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  9. .. 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.

  10. Udi's a smart guy by TFoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:should not that be th eother way around? by AnotherDaveB · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

  12. Udi Man? by Gorimek · · Score: 4, Funny

    No, You the man!!

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