Just a quick shout out to everyone… I’ve decided to leave Microsoft and join Amazon.com!

Now, some of you are certainly going to be asking, “Why would a long-time established search guy leave one of the major search players?”

The reasons are fairly mundane, as it turns out. I need to move my career forward, and there is a great fit and opportunity at Amazon.com to do that. I’m still very interested in search and will remain involved, such as with SIGIR, WWW, and WSDM. Further, the first task I’ll be working on at Amazon is item authority and matching, which is a nasty internal search problem. Given a huge catalog of products for sale, and a new set of products, identify which ones are already in the catalog and which ones aren’t. The rub is that mistakes cost money, and lots of it. Unify two products that aren’t the same, and when a customer orders one he or she might get the other, resulting in a return and other headaches. Miss things, and you end up with lots of duplicates which clutter search results.

So far, I’ve been hugely impressed with Amazon.com. My first day was Friday, which was a random day (vs a Monday when they normally have an orientation). But I got my badge and laptop in minutes of arriving, had a clean office and desktop, and in general everything was good to go! Even my e-mail was setup with the right alias (selberg!) This has been my best onboarding ever. All other companies, including Microsoft, invariably had me spend the first week pushing through various issues that weren’t solved by the employee onboarding… like getting a computer, waiting for an e-mail account, getting my e-mail alias fixed, etc. Amazon’s reputation for being efficient is well earned!