eBay has announced they have hired Dr. Eric Brill as their vice president of research and applied science to lead up eBay’s research labs team. Prior, Dr. Brill was General Manager of adCenter Labs at Microsoft and before that, he Director and Principal Researcher and head of the Text Mining, Search and Navigation Group at Microsoft Research.

Microsoft has quietly pulled his bio page but Google still has a cached version.

“Search is all about predictions, highly educated guesses about what people really mean when they type in a word like Diesel or a phrase like ‘red, white and blue’,” said Mark Carges, eBay’s CTO and SVP of Marketplaces Product. “Eric’s expertise in natural language processing and data mining is a huge asset as we continue to improve our ability to determine customer intent and get the right products in front of the right buyer at exactly the right moment.”

Related Topics: Microsoft: Business Issues | Microsoft: Employees

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz