• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 18, 2024

Google has made several changes to its executive search team, starting with Liz Reid, who is stepping in as head of Search at Google. She previously led core search experiences at Google.

Reid joined Google in 2003 as one of the first engineers on the team that built Google Local. She said the feature laid the foundation for the local information in Google Search and Maps.

In her early days, she focused on solving the technical challenges of surfacing high quality and accurate local information in the company's products.

"We may take this for granted now, but back then, it wasn’t so easy to find a great local pastry shop near you in an unfamiliar city," she wrote. "I'm incredibly grateful to work with an amazing team at Google that is working tirelessly to improve and evolve Search."

As she steps into this new role, Reid will continue Google's mission to help people find answers to even the most challenging questions. Many of those questions will be answered by generative artificial intelligence (GAI) in products like Search Generative Experience (SGE).

People have already conducted billions of queries with SGE, although it is still a Search Labs feature. Google introduced it as a feature last year.

More changes will be coming soon, Reid wrote.

“We’re pleased to share that we’re unifying the Search org under Liz Reid – a longtime and well-respected leader at Google with deep product and technical knowledge,” a Google spokesperson told Media Daily News. “We have great momentum in Search, with recent improvements in search quality, new ways to search like Circle to Search, and features using gen AI to help with even more complex questions.”

"I am humbled by the opportunity to shape the future of this important product," Reid wrote in a LinkedIn post late Monday.

Cheenu Venkatachary will lead the Google Search quality and ranking teams. He began his work at Google in May 2013, and remained through December 2014, but left to work at a company Apple acquired before returning to Google in October 2022.

Pandu Nayak will step down as vice president of search to lead search quality and ranking, and will become the chief scientist of search. He will remain involved in Google’s broader efforts around content understanding, ranking and exploring how new AI technologies can enhance search. 

Cathy Edwards will move to the Long-term Bets team in Knowledge and Information. She also made a personal decision to move back home to Australia to be closer to her family. She came to Google through the acquisition of the product search company, Undecidable Labs, in 2016.

Previously, Cathy worked on search at Apple after its app search and discovery engine Chomp was acquired by the company in 2012.