🔍 a shakeup at Google Search

New Head of Search at Google

Google's Search team undergoes a shakeup: Liz Reid takes the helm as Head of Search, Cheenu Venkatachary leads Search quality and ranking, while Pandu Nayak becomes Chief Scientist of Search. Cathy Edwards transitions to the Long-term Bets team in Knowledge and Information.

Liz Reid certainly has her work cut out for her.

But that’s a good thing. Even if she shifts search in a marginally positive direction, it’ll be an improvement from her predecessor who had seen declining quality in search.

People will be happy if the ship is righted even a little bit.

I recently read a Naval quote. I’m paraphrasing, but having a CEO who can improve a billion-dollar company by even 10% is mathematically worth 100 million dollars.

That’s where Google finds itself. Of course, their company is worth way more than $1 billion. In fact, it’s worth more than $1 trillion!

And search is a very large part of the Google brand. It’s the flagship product and the one generating most of its traffic still.

So decisions like who will run search for Google are BIG to say the least.

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There is an obvious analogy to SEO here.

A seemingly marginal change to your website that improves web traffic 1% (or better yet 10%) is huge.

As an SEO, that’s what we’re constantly trying to do…make seemingly small changes that can have a big effect on your business.

It’s subtle work and work I admit can go unnoticed.

There’s a lot of SEO “gurus” out there talking about their monster gains. How in a few months they improved things 200%. It happens, sure.

But most of us SEOs are working on the margins. Trying to give you a little bump here. A small improvement there.

It’s the small shifts that have the biggest effects on your business or website in the long-term.

Liz Reid is the big change at Google. But now, she is tasked with making the small changes that will put Google Search on the better path.

I wish her luck from one SEO to another 🫡