Vanessa Fox Leaves Google, Heads To Zillow

Jun 14, 2007 at 1:21pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Google Webmaster Central product manager Vanessa Fox is heading for pastures new — jumping over to become product team lead at real estate start-up Zillow. She’ll be overseeing the development of new ad, feed and email products there.

Vanessa talks about the move more on her blog, saying:

For the last two years, I have had a fantastic time helping to build Google Webmaster Central. I have loved working with the (ever-expanding!) team, writing about search on the blog and for the help center, and designing features for the webmaster community. And speaking of the webmaster community, I have been lucky enough to have been able to meet them, get to know their challenges, and well, then there’s the drinking. There may have been a little of that too. Search is a fascinating industry and I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to create such exciting things in the space.

Now I have an all-new opportunity to work on the unique challenges of the vertical and local search space at Zillow. I’m moving on from webmaster central knowing that there’s a great team who care as much about this audience as I do and they’ve got exciting plans in store for the coming year. I’ll really miss working with my team, but I’m happy they’ve been getting out and meeting more of you and I know they’ve had a great time drinking with you too. I mean talking. Did I say drinking?

Vanessa’s been a great resource for many webmasters plus overseen the huge and welcome growth of Google Webmaster Central, so it’s sad to see her go from that perspective. But the team has expanded in other ways, with her announcing yesterday that Susan Moskwa is joining Jonathan Simon as a webmaster trends analyst. They both watch forums, blogs and elsewhere to understand what site owners are concerned about.

Best of luck, Vanessa, from all of us here at Search Engine Land!

Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, maintains a personal blog called Daggle and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

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