Yahoo! Exec Exodus Continues

"Just time to move on, I think," Schachter said in an e-mail, but didn't share further details.

In the two weeks since Yahoo announced Microsoft's overtures for the company and then its search group officially dead and Yahoo and Google signed a non-exclusive advertising pack, several top Yahoo execs have headed for the exits.

Among them are a few of the company's top search execs. This week, senior VP and general manager of Yahoo Search Vish Makhijani left to become CEO of Russian search engine Yandex's Yandex Labs, where he'll improve Yandex's search technology, including search algorithms.

Qi Lu, executive VP of engineering for Yahoo's search and advertising technology group, is also on the way out, according to several reports. Li has been in charge of building Yahoo's Panama search marketing system, the future of which had been up in the air among the discussions with Microsoft and the eventual non-exclusive ad deal with Google. It's not going away, but Lu is.

Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo's apparently outgoing senior VP of communities and communications, oversaw some of Yahoo's biggest ticket items like Flickr and Yahoo Mail and Messenger. About two years ago, Garlinghouse wrote a now famous memo called the "Peanut Butter Manifesto" detailing Yahoo's problems two years ago that used peanut butter as a metaphor for the company's failures. It's unclear where Garlinghouse is headed, or even whether he's left, but his departure has been reported by both TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal's BoomTown blog.

Yahoo! will announce details of a major reorganisation in an attempt to steady the besieged internet portal that has lost a number of high-level executives while fighting off a $47.5 billion takeover bid by Microsoft, the software giant.

It is hoped the restructure, which will centralise several product groups and is due to be announced next week, will fill holes created by the departure of senior managers.

This week Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo!'s network division, announced he would be leaving.

His resignation followed that of another vice president Usama Fayyed, and the co-creators of the photo-sharing site Flickr - Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake - which Yahoo bought in 2005.