Google Search has a new head. This business is headed by Liz Reid, who has been working at Google for more than 20 years. Most recently, she was the head of artificial intelligence-based search, known as Search Generative Experience (SGE).
Reid’s promotion is part of a larger shift in Google’s search team. Pandu Nayak, who served as vice president of search and focused on various aspects of search quality, will now become chief search scientist. He will be replaced by Chenu Venkatacharya, who also worked on AI products in search. Meanwhile, Katie Edwards, who worked on Google News and Google Discover, has accepted a job on Google’s Long-Term Bets team.
These changes in the leadership show that Google sees AI as the foundation of the future search service. For 25 years, users have been accustomed to entering keywords into the search box and expecting a bunch of ranked links in return. In an AI-powered world, you can instead upload a photo and Gemini will tell you what’s in it and how to buy it. You can speak a question into the headphone microphone and get a full answer from the speakers.
CEO Sundar Pichai and others have been saying for years that language models and other AI systems can both improve the quality of search results and completely change the way we think about gathering information online. This is especially true now, when the web is increasingly filled with content created by artificial intelligence and optimized for SEO. In this environment, making Google search great again is becoming more difficult and important than ever.
Reid has spent the last few years working on AI and multisearch, which demonstrate the changes in Google’s approach and thinking about search.
«Thanks to SGE, we can meet a wider range of information needs and answer new types of questions, including more complex ones, such as comparisons or longer queries,», — Liz Reid wrote.
And soon there will be more, she said.
Source: The Verge