In the ongoing employee tug-of-war that the top three search companies are waging, it looks like Yahoo’s scored a significant win.  Yoelle Maarek, who used to receive paychecks from Google, has accepted the title "Senior Director of Yahoo Research."

Maarek actually founded the Google Haifa Engineering Center in 2006 and acted as Engineering Director there.  During her stay with the search giant, Maarek’s team launched features like Google Suggest, Searching Ads, and Interactive Annotations on YouTube, too.

 

Now, as a post on the Yahoo Search Blog explains, "She will be leading the Yahoo! Lab in Haifa, Israel along with Ronny Lempel.  Their teams help further Yahoo!’s commitment to discovering new technologies that deliver compelling experiences on the Web."

Additional hints as to what specific direction the research might take aren’t really given, but the post does also state, "You can go to Yoelle’s website to read all about her impressive research experience in information retrieval, Web applications, and collaborative technologies."

It wouldn’t be at all surprising if Google and Microsoft are a little nervous about how this development might turn out.