A seemingly rare departure from Microsoft’s search team, which has stepped up its efforts to recruit top engineers from rivals: Hugh Williams, a Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) search development manager, is heading to eBay (NSDQ: EBAY). Williams tells us via e-mail that he will be leading the e-commerce company’s search development team. The move was first reported by Silicon Alley Insider, which notes that in his LinkedIn profile, Williams takes credit for several new features in Microsoft’s relaunched search engine Bing. From the profile: “I managed the development of all user-facing web search relevance features, including the left-rail explore pane (with its “table of contents”), navigational query treatments, query-biased summaries, “deeplinks”, related searches, and whole page results relevance.”

• Microsoft Adds Two More Former Yahoos, Including VP Of International Search