There Must Be Really Few Competent People Out There�

The holiday season is the time when people usually consider the things they've done in the previous year, stop to ponder about whether they're happy at their job, if they are emotionally satisfied with the person they're next to, you know, this sort of stuff. I'm betting it's all the free time to blame for the insight.

The 2007 holidays have brought a lot of interesting exchanges between the search engines. Not like in the playing card games really, with matching people to the jobs they're best suited for, but more like matching them to the jobs available. Microsoft guy went to YouTube, God knows why, Yahoo!er joined Google Code, and so on and so forth. The one move that is well thought so far is the latest one from Ask.com, who hired a former Google head of strategic partnerships and business development for Southern Europe and assigned him to the position of European Managing Director. These two jobs are pretty close.

Cesar Mascaraque will start working at the Europe offices on February 4th, 2008. He motivated his decision to accept the job by saying that "I have watched the brand set itself apart from competitors by pioneering new products and offering innovative ways of bringing search to users. [�] I look forward to working with the international teams to build on this already successful model," he told vnunet.com.

Ask.com has recently gone through a CEO change with Jim Lanzone leaving and being replaced by Match.com's CEO, Jim Safka. The latter said about the newly hired that: "With his extensive online expertise and tremendous business acumen, Mascaraque will be a great leader for Ask.com's European operations." The position of European Managing Director was left vacant by Myles Runham, who has been with the search engine since 2001. I wonder what search engine Myles will end up working for?