The Web search leader confirmed a report on the industry blog Search Engine Land that Bosworth, a vice president, had left the Mountain View, California-based company.

"Adam is a great talent and was instrumental in starting Google Health," Google Inc spokesman Steve Landon said in a statement. "He is now on vacation and has decided to pursue other opportunities after that."

Adam Bosworth (far right) with faculty mebers from SYS-CON's AJAXWorld Conference & Expo

Marissa Mayer, the head of Google's core search products business, will run the health team for an interim period until a new leader takes over. "Google is moving forward with work on our health products," the company said.

He is the second executive in the past month to say he would leave Google's 44-strong executive team -- three years after the company's initial public offering. Chief Financial Officer George Reyes said he would retire by the end of 2007.

Bosworth, who joined Google three years ago, had been thought by Google watchers to be at work on a major new health service. Since last year, speculation has centered on ideas ranging from a health information search service to a way for allowing Google users to create a personal medical record.

"People need the medical information that is out there and available to be organized and made accessible to all," Bosworth said in an official company blog post late in 2006. "Patients also need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information," he wrote.

So far, in the health field, Google has only introduced Google Co-op, a mechanism that allows users to tag, or classify specialized types of data, including health information.

In the mid-1990s Bosworth had helped pioneer XML, or Extensible Markup Language, which provides the underpinning for organizing and classifying different types of information on the Web, a process popularly known as tagging.

• A Conversation with Adam Bosworth
• Adam Bosworth on the "Mom Factor" in Web Services
• AJAXWorld 2006 West Power Panel with Google's Adam Bosworth
• "Google Health" Launched Very Googily, Adam Bosworth Style: "If It Gets Used, It'll Get Developed Further"