Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s head of search appoints new leads

In June 2020, Google appointed a new head of Search, Prabhakar Raghavan. Now, Prabhakar Raghavan is making some leadership changes to help him run Google Search. The company has notified the employees impacted by this change this morning.

What is not changing is that Google’s Vice President of Search, Pandu Nayak is still leading Search Quality. Jen Fitzpatrick is still leading the central engineering team at the company. And, Jerry Dischler is still the head of Google Ads.

The new roles involve Elizabeth Reid, Cathy Edwards, Sissie Hsiao and Bill Ready. All these new roles will report up to Prabhakar Raghavan.

Google has confirmed these changes with Search Engine Land. “We are constantly evolving to ensure that we are delivering against our mission of helping people access information and get things done. These changes will help us continue to drive focus on our largest opportunities and innovate on behalf of the people who use our products around the world,” a spokesperson told us.

Elizabeth Reid to lead core search experiences

Elizabeth Reid will now be overseeing Google’s search experiences, including Google Image search. Both product and engineering will report to her. Elizabeth Reid previously led the Google Maps and other Geo-related engineering teams, such as Google My Business.

She is a long-time Google vet, who has been with the company for over 17 years. Like everyone who started at Google early on, she has a lot of experience with Google’s core search products and services.

Cathy Edwards to lead Google Apps, News, Discover and ecosystem efforts

Cathy Edwards will now lead Google Apps, Google News, Google Discover and other ecosystem efforts, such as making the web faster and supporting web initiatives. Previously, she has led Image search and was a VP of engineering. You may have seen her on some recent Google videos promoting Google Search.

She has been at Google for about four-and-half years, previously worked at Apple as the director of engineering, and co-founded a company named Chomp, which was an app-based search engine.

Sissie Hsiao to lead Google Assistant product and engineering

Sissie Hsiao will now lead Assistant product and engineering at Google. Previously, she was a lead of display, video, app advertising at Google. With her taking over engineering of Assistant, Scott Huffman will be seeking new opportunities after leading this effort at Google for many years. Scott Huffman has been with Google for over 15 years.

Sissie Hsiao is also a long time Googler, who has been with the company for also about 15 years, working on a wide array of Google services from Google Docs, Google Search, Google Analytics and advertising. Before that, she spent several years at Microsoft working on the Office product. Tim Craycroft at Google will take over Sissie’s role as lead of display, video, app advertising at Google.

Other changes

There are other changes within the company, less on the Search side. Nick Fox, the VP of product management will work on new bets at the company. And Bill Ready will bring together Google Pay-like products, including Commerce, Payments, and NBU.

For many of you, these changes will feel quite minimal. For others, they may feel more significant. This may impact some of the jobs at Google specifically in these fields listed above. It seems like Prabhakar Raghavan has a plan and set a team forth to execute on those plans. It is also nice to see the three big changes involve women in new leadership roles.

Congrats to all those in these new roles and we are excited to see what changes come to Google Search, Google Ads, Google Maps and so forth with these new leaders.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.