Google is making a number of changes to its executive team that runs Google Search:
- Liz Reedwho was leading core search experiments, will now become head of Google's search division.
- Cheenu Venkachari It will be the new leader in search quality and ranking.
With these changes, Bandu Nayak He will step down as lead for research quality and classification and become chief research scientist. In another change, Cathy Edwards He moves to the team for long-term bets in knowledge and information.
What did google say. A Google spokesperson sent Search Engine Land the following statement:
- “We are thrilled to share with you that we are unifying the search organization under the leadership of Liz Reed – a long-time, highly respected leader at Google with deep product and technical knowledge. We have great momentum in search, with recent improvements in search quality, and new ways to search like Circle to Search, and features that use general artificial intelligence to help with more complex questions. For example, SGE, which is still just a feature for search labs, has already been used for billions of queries. We are excited to bring our search teams together under its leadership.
Liz Reed. About three years ago, Reid was appointed to lead the core search trial by Prabhakar Raghavan. She will continue to report to Raghavan in her new role as Head of Research.
Reed joined Google in 2003. She is credited as one of the early pioneers of Google Maps and local search and helped Google redefine the modern mapping industry using artificial intelligence. Reed was also the first female engineer in the company's New York office.
For research, Reed helped:
Liz Reed posted on LinkedIn “Today, I take on a new role leading research, and I am humbled by the opportunity to shape the future of this important product.” You can read her full message at LinkedIn.
Cheenu Venkachari. Venkatachari will lead the quality and rankings teams at Google Search, assuming Nayak's role. Venkatachari originally worked at Google from May 2013 to December 2014, then left to work at a company that was acquired by Apple. He returned to Google in October 2022.
Bandu Nayak. Nayak has become the chief scientist for the research, where he will continue to advise and focus on the technical challenges in the research. Google told us it will remain deeply involved in Google's broader efforts around understanding and ranking content and exploring how new AI technologies can improve Google Search.
Google credits Nayak as the foremost expert on algorithms, classification, and information systems. Nayak is Google's newest member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Cathy Edwards. Edwards, who led the Google Apps, News, Discover and ecosystem efforts in 2021, returns to Australia and will join the Long-term Bets team. Edwards, co-founder of Chomp (acquired by Apple), will help incubate new product ideas in partnership with leaders in the knowledge and information space.
Why do we care? It remains to be seen how this might impact Google search and overall search quality. Google often makes high-level changes with its executive teams, and then people move on. I'm sure there will be a lot of speculation as to why these moves are being made, but in general, the roles of those moving into other roles within the company seem to be filled by really smart, decent individuals.
