Search & AdWords API Engineer, Bids Google A Final Farewell

Nelson Minar, one of the main shakers and movers behind Google's Web APIs has officially announced on his blog that he's leaving Google after 5 years with the Internet Giant. Based out of the Googleplex in San Francisco, Nelson built the Search & AdWords APIs while tweaking around with other interesting stuff like a bunch of Java webapp work, object-relational mappings and servlet infrastucture.

In his blog, Minar wrote:

"Today's my last day as an employee of Google. It feels a bit strange leaving such a great and productive company. But I'm ready to do something new with a smaller group of people. I particularly enjoyed being able to meddle and consult on various products as they were being born. "

Prior to joining Google in 2001, Nelson used to be a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab Software Agents Group where one of the open source projects he created was a distributed agent architecture for building decentralized applications out of ecologies of mobile agents, later code-named as Hive.

Googlers in Phoenix Raise Over $3,200 for Cancer Research

A team of 28 Google employees calling themselves, The Phoenix Googlers, joined hundreds of Arizona State University (ASU) students and walked together to raise more than $75,000 to benefit the American Cancer Society at this year’s ASU Relay for Life on Friday night at Sun Angel Stadium. The 12-hour event which kicked off at 8pm Friday night until 8am Saturday morning, saw the Googlers raising more than $3,200 for advancing cancer research.