“This month, the company has quietly rolled out to U.S. users its new search engine, known inside the company as Cassini.” Today, after much blood sweat and tears, we finally got to tell the world that Cassini has launched.

Why the quiet launch? Well it was always interesting to see the occasional article where someone would claim that Cassini has damaged their search results – before Cassini even hit the live site! There are lots of reasons why a sellers sales can change, but Cassini itself should not be one of them. A lot of testing went on behind the scenes to ensure the launch was a smooth one without negative impact on customers.

My personal kudos goes to the team behind the scenes who made Cassini possible. When I came over from Australia to lead the Search Engine Engineering team at eBay I had only met two people from the team itself. It has been great to see all their enthusiasm and passion to make this ambitious project the success it is today. Almost as good as seeing Cassini launch without issue! So team, my thanks to you especially!