Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Jerry Yang is still Yahoo’s CEO, although the rest of the company is fast becoming unrecognizable. A major realignment of the company is underway, with President Sue Decker solidly in the driver’s seat.

The plan to restructure along three main vertical lines was announced yesterday. The broad platform of divisions supporting each specific product will be replaced by:

The Audience Products Division will be geared towards product management, and will take on the responsibility for product strategy companywide as well. Ash Patel from the former Products and Infrastructure division will head it up.

A US region with accountability for all go-to-market US activity will focus on bringing products to market for users, advertisers and publishers. Hilary Schneider, who ran the company’s Global Partners Solutions group, will be piloting it.

The Insight Strategy Team will plan and execute a strategy for the use of all data and analysis. The leader for this division has not yet been named, and it is unknown if Google will fill the position internally or bring someone in from the outside to manage it.

The Technology sector of the company is also getting a facelift; Yahoo will be attempting to wire into common platforms, and strengthen the bond between product and engineering teams.

Another new division is the Cloud Computing and Data Infrastructure group, to balance scalability with cost effectiveness. Venkat Panchapakesan will be leading the Audience Technology group, which will now include all consumer-facing platform teams.

Prabhakar Raghavan will continue to run Yahoo Research, and add to his duties the command of Search Strategy. Tuoc Luong (leader of Search Engineering) will also move in behind Yahoo’s search group, expanding his own responsibilities as he serves as interim leader of the search product team. David Ku will lead the Advertising Technology Group within Search.

It seems that the shake up will settle down with most of the change being internal. The board meeting will be almost irrelevant, and is expected to end in only a few board members being replaced. In all, it seems to have been a long term plan, and the whole Microsoft / Icahn debacle was just a momentary distraction.

“The changes we’re making today will help deliver superior global products for users and enable faster and better decision-making,” said President Sue Decker. “This is a logical next step in light of our success last year in moving to a more centralized approach to developing world-class marketing products. We have planned these changes deliberately over the past several months to clarify responsibilities and to capitalize on the scale advantages while allowing for fine tuning to meet local market needs.”