Moss will report to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges and be responsible for managing and developing the back-end buyer and seller experience on eBay’s marketplace, where items are auctioned off or sold new for full price.

Most recently, Moss co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology.

While CrowdEye’s Web site has been taken down, it’s expected that its co-founder (and Moss’s wife) Becca Moss will continue working on the technology, which was once being described as a Twitter search engine.

Prior to CrowdEye, Moss spent 20 years at Microsoft, where he started and led the Bing search technical team. He also worked on MyMSN, MSN Money and other parts of MSN.

Over the past year, eBay has been redesigning its site to simplify the user experience and to offer both items sold at auction or for full price. In the past few months, it has hired a number of new executives to fill several roles to complete the turnaround.

Moss will presumably assist with those goals in a more behind-the-scenes technology role.

As the possible acquisition of Groupon by Google chugs along–sources tell me bankers are starting to swan around annoyingly, which could be a sign of fruition, but we shall see–BoomTown realized that I have been remiss in mentioning one likely key person in the deal strategy.

And, I am only guessing, that would be the Silicon Valley search giant’s relatively new head of commerce, Stephanie Tilenius (pictured above).

That’s because the unassuming former longtime eBay exec–you won’t see her all over the scene swanning, for sure–is one of the few at the company sharp enough to have seen Groupon’s copious local retail data from its social buying business as a strong fit into Google.

I met Tilenius a dog’s age ago when she co-founded PlanetRx.com, a very early online drugstore in Web 1.0.

In her long tenure at eBay, she ran eBay North America, global product management for eBay Marketplaces, merchant services at its PayPal unit, eBay Motors and eBay Asia Pacific and Latin America.

After she left eBay in late 2009, Tilenius came to Google early this year, in the newly created position of VP of commerce. In that job, she has purview over Google Checkout, payment system and e-commerce.

And, while Google’s former search experience and now new local head Marissa Mayer is often mentioned as benefiting from this Goopon deal, it seems to me that it is Tilenius who will be charged with taking Google in this pricey and risky new direction.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

And what it sees is a big opportunity for PayPal.

In connection with the company’s analyst meeting today, eBay said its growth will be driven by its two core businesses: PayPal and e-commerce. In something of a repositioning, the company says that PayPal “has become a second core business,” with an opportunity to become even bigger than eBay Marketplaces.

CEO John Donahoe said in a statement that the company expects PayPal to become “the next leading online global payments network” and that PayPal is “one of the most exciting and high-potential opportunities anywhere online today.” That’s important, because the company isn’t really expecting to see any growth from the Marketplaces business, which has been shrinking in recent quarters.

Meanwhile, he said the company is “aggressively remaking and transforming” the Marketplaces business.

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The move comes on a day when the Street greeted the company’s second-quarter results with some disappointment, apparently due in part to weaker than expected gross merchandise value from the Marketplaces business in the quarter. As noted earlier, gross merchandise volume was $15.68 billion, up eight percent year over year, but down two percent sequentially.

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