Microsoft Continues Peeling Off Yahoo Search Talent

Feb 12, 2009 at 9:09am ET by Greg Sterling

Microsoft (so far) has been unable to buy Yahoo or Yahoo search assets, so it instead continues to take search talent away from the company. Last year Microsoft successfully lured engineering lead Qi Lu from Yahoo to become head of the company’s Online Services Group. Redmond also recently nabbed Sean Suchter from Yahoo.

Now Bloomberg and CNET report that another Yahoo executive, Larry Heck, will be working on Microsoft search. Heck was, until now, Vice President of the Search & Advertising Sciences at Yahoo Labs. Before that he was Vice President of R&D at Nuance Communications, “where he led teams responsible for natural language processing, speech recognition, voice authentication, and text-to-speech synthesis.”

This suggests more emphasis on voice search (read: mobile) at Microsoft. But the company has an overabundance of speech assets already, having acquired Tellme in March, 2007.

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and writes a personal blog Screenwerk, examining the broader world of media and advertising. He also posts at a Local Mobile Search, which is focused on the mobile Internet.

See more articles by Greg Sterling >

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ONE COMMENT ON Microsoft Continues Peeling Off Yahoo Search Talent

BigDaddyBooth, February 12th, 2009 at 11:32 am ET:

So, when are they going to start improving the steaming pile of crap that is Microsoft adCenter?

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