This is my last week at Endeca. The decision to leave has been a heart-wrenching one: not only have the past ten years been the best of my life, but my experiences at Endeca have defined me professionally. Moreover, Endeca is riding a wave of success with recent advances in our products, new relationships with key partners, and fascinating new deployments.  (You can read Endeca’s latest announcements in our newsroom).

Ironically, it is this very success that compels me to move on. In the past several years, I have developed an increasing passion for search on the open web–an interest only furthered by the explosion of social media.

That is why I’ve decided to accept an opportunity at Google’s New York office. Readers here know that I’ve been a very public critic of Google’s simplistic approach to user interaction on the open web. I’m being offered an opportunity to help fix that approach–and it is an offer I can’t refuse. My mission is to apply my passion for human-computer information retrieval (HCIR), an approach that Endeca has pioneered in the enterprise, t