The head of Amazon.com's online search effort is leaving to join Google, the latest in a series of high-profile hires for the search-engine leader.

Udi Manber, who has been chief executive of Amazon's A9 subsidiary, will be a vice president of engineering at Google, spokeswoman Lynn Fox said Tuesday.

Manber's defection marks the latest coup for Google, the Mountain View, Calif., search-engine company.

In September, the company snagged Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf from MCI. Also last fall, Microsoft and Google waged a court battle over Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee's decision to resign from Microsoft to oversee Google's efforts to open a research center in China. That case has since been settled.

Google's other recent notable hires included longtime Microsoft executive Mark Lucovsky and former eBay executive Louis Monier, who was also a key player in the development of AltaVista.

Manber is being replaced at A9 by David Tennenhouse. Tennenhouse was a vice president and director of research at Intel.