Google’s new ‘Head of Search’ Liz Reid teases ‘more’ SGE developments

Ben Schoon | Mar 19 2024 - 8:55 am PT

Google Search has changed a lot over the past couple of years, and it seems more changes are coming. This week, Google has appointed a new “Head of Search” in Liz Reid, who is teasing more AI changes in the pipeline.

Within Google, two major changes have been made to Search executives. Liz Reid is taking over as Head of Search, with Cheenu Venkatachary now leading “Search quality and ranking.” Pandu Nayak is also moving to become a Chief Scientist of Search, while Cathy Edwards will move to the “Long-term bets” team in Knowledge and Information.

The changes were first reported by SearchEngineLand.

The biggest change here comes with the appointment of Liz Reid as Head of Search, an obviously massive role within Google. Reid was worked at Google since 2003. Under her new role, she will report to Prabhakar Raghavan, a long-time Senior Vice President at Google in charge of Search, Assistant, Ads, and more.

Google said in a statement:

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. 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. For example, SGE, still only a Search Labs feature, has already been used for billions of queries. We’re excited to bring our Search teams together under her leadership.

Through Google’s statement, it’s clear that AI is a huge focus of this reorganization, and Reid further teases new developments with AI and SGE in a post on LinkedIn. There she says:

In fact, people have already issued billions of queries with SGE since we introduced it as a feature in Search Labs last year. We’ve had incredibly positive feedback on the combination of quick answers and the ability to dive deeper on the web. With SGE, we are able to serve a wider range of information needs and answer new types of questions, including more complex questions, like comparisons or longer queries. More coming soon!

SGE debuted in 2023 as Google’s AI-enhanced search experience. Users are given generative AI responses to queries which can summarize information found throughout the search results. The feature has been in “Labs” since May 2023, but is still not live by default. Google says that “billions of queries” have been run in SGE so far.