Doug Cutting, creator of the Hadoop technology that powered Yahoo’s search index, is leaving the company at the end of August for a position at Cloudera.

While the immediate reaction is to assume this is related to the Yahoo-Microsoft deal, in which Microsoft would take over Yahoo’s search engine, Cutting tells the New York Times that’s not the case.

“This has been in the works for awhile and is unrelated,” Mr. Cutting said. “I am definitely not leaving in any sort of protest, and the thing I like least about this move is that it might be perceived that way.”

On his personal blog, Cutting says he’ll be doing much the same work with Cloudera that he was doing at Yahoo, and will continue working with Yahoo developers.

Hadoop is open-source software that allows large-scale data mining and analysis — the kind of stuff you’d need to build a high-level search engine that spans the always-expanding web. Greg Sterling went into more detail about Hadoop earlier this year.

On Twitter today, Yahoo thanked Cutting “for all the great work you did” at Yahoo.

Related Topics: Yahoo: Employees

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