In a season when many in the search game are leaving for the beach, one Beach is jetting from Yahoo!. David Beach, senior product manager of Yahoo! Shopping Search, confirmed rumors of his departure on his blog yesterday (via Barry Schwartz; Laughing Squid broke it).

Beach joins Robert Scoble in the ‘Leaving for a Start-Up Society,’ as his next gig will be Director of Product Management at Wink. A social search engine, Wink “integrates tag results from multiple sources such as del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo MyWeb” and “gives you the freshest information on the web by serving up the most relevant tagged links for your search” (that is, according to the FAQ).

Describing the company as an “ideal fit,” Beach praises the fast-paced, risk-taking “start-up environment,” comparing it to an independent record label. He says, “…they can capitalize on trends at a faster pace to maximize growth. They can build a following that can take the big boys by surprise.”

As for the big boys, Beach leaves Yahoo! with nothing but kind words. He does, however, have one regret; he’d hoped that his moment on Valleywag “would have been about some possible exploits in Bangkok that may or may not have taken place in the summer of 1988,” not just a quick note about his bolting to Wink. Good luck, David (and not just with getting something juicy in Valleywag)!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 at 11:42 am and is filed under People on the Move. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.