According to morning news on May 4, Beijing time, Google has eight major product lines, namely: advertising, commerce and local, mobile communications (Android), social networking, Chrome browser, YouTube and search. And search is undoubtedly Google's most important product. But from now on, Google's search team will be history. With Larry Page taking over as CEO in April, Google's search team has been renamed the "Knowledge Group" within the company.
Google has acknowledged the change to the outside world and also pointed out that the change actually appeared in a report to the SEC on April 11, but no one seemed to notice at the time that an executive vice president would be in charge. Responsible for managing this new mysterious team.
For this change, Google said there are historical factors.
Previously, Google Search leadership, like the rest of Google's product lines, was jointly managed by Marissa Mayer, vice president of product, and Udi Manber, vice president of engineering. Responsible for the search product business, the latter is responsible for the search technology business. Late last year, Mayer was transferred to take charge of local commerce. Alan Eustace currently manages the search team, with Mambo reporting directly to Eustace. This personnel arrangement shows that Eustace has been responsible for the search team alone, and he reports directly to Page.
According to people familiar with the matter, Page has long believed that search was only a small part of Google's original plan: "to organize the world's information and allow users to easily access and use the information that is useful to them anytime, anywhere." Because Page's ultimate goal is not just to integrate this information. For him, what is more important is how to let users understand and learn innovative knowledge.
But the problem is that "searching" simply means looking for what you want. With Google's rapid development in the past few years, Google's vertical search engine was first embedded in search results in 2007 through Universal Search. Later, Google Squared was integrated. In addition, Google has been making other attempts, such as Google Base, Google Knol, etc.
In fact, as early as 2007, Google talked about Google Knol in its official blog. Manbo once said in his blog at the time: "Page, Brin and Schmidt have given us a serious task, which is to ask us to find ways and means to help others share knowledge. This is our main goal Target."
These products have been handled by Mambo in the past. Currently still part of the search/knowledge team.
Therefore, the current operating model of the team is: Eustace is responsible for the management and operation of the entire team. Reporting directly to Eustace, Mambo is also focused on improving the quality of knowledge and information and promoting the production of more high-quality knowledge and information. Regardless of whether this information exists on Google's servers.
Mambo's colleague Amit Singhal, chief engineer of Google's search algorithm, is currently working on traditional search goals, such as recent adjustments to Google's search algorithm.
Sources within Google's knowledge team say that Singer's job is like weeding (removing lower-quality content from search results), while Mambo's job is like sowing seeds (promoting the growth of good varieties).
Perhaps Google does not want the outside world to have a clear understanding of how the company operates, so in the report submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company only used a few words to introduce the team's name change, so as to avoid the outside world being aware of it as much as possible.
Sources from within Google said that the reason why a new team was not set up was that Google wanted to be more united internally. It's not yet known when Google will be ready to discuss the development of Knowledge Teams more publicly.