Dr. Qi Lu

Lu looks to be an important addition.  He was employed by Yahoo for about 10 years, most recently working as executive vice president of Engineering for the Search and Advertising Technology Group.  Before that, Lu spent time at IBM, and earned a Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.  So we’re talking about an extremely bright individual.

People who have commented on an article titled "Dear Yahoos: Does Qi Lu Have What It Takes To Fix MSN?" also paint the man as a hard worker who puts in long hours.

As part of Microsoft’s formal announcement, Lu himself said in a statement, "I am genuinely excited about the opportunities ahead for Microsoft to make an enormous impact on the online industry.  Microsoft has built a great foundation for its search and advertising technologies and put an amazing team of researchers and engineers in place to drive the next wave of innovation in online services.  I’m looking forward to working with them to help transform the way people and businesses use the Internet to find and share information."

Lu will report to Steve Ballmer, and is scheduled to start on Monday, January 5th.

We’ve wondered a couple of times, in the wake of Yahoo’s ad deal with Google, how Yahoo’s Panama team could possibly stick around the company. Yahoo essentially declared Panama a failure, touting how much more money they can bring in simply by dropping Google’s AdSense for Search onto Yahoo’s search results.

TechCrunch now says Qi Lu, executive VP for search & ad technology at Yahoo, will leave the company. He was Panama’s chief architect, as Yahoo strove to develop a search ad system to approach Google’s effectiveness.

To put it mildly, that hasn’t happened. Yahoo executives expect their deal with Google to drop $800 million in annual revenue into the company. Yahoo and its Panama group tried to get a lot closer to Google in allowing relevance to dictate search placement, but it wasn’t enough.

Senior VP and general manager of search, Vish Makhijani, will head to Russia and take the position of president and CEO of Yandex.Labs in Silicon Valley, according to TechCrunch. Yahoo’s infamous Peanut Butter Manifesto author, Brad Garlinghouse, also will depart.

However, All Things D said Garlinghouse isn’t out the door yet. “He has not resigned or told his subordinates of any plans as yet,” Kara Swisher said of Garlinghouse, who feels unhappy about a pending Yahoo reorganization.