• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 11, 2024

Shailesh Prakash, vice president and general manager for Google News, has resigned. He is known to be important to the company's relationships with publishers.

Prakash joined Google two years ago from the Washington Post, where he spent more than a decade overseeing data and technology. He also worked previously at Sears Holdings and Microsoft. 

Citing people familiar with the decision, The Wall Street Journal reported on his resignation. 

Google has faced scrutiny in recent months over its business practices with publishers and the alleged harm they have caused to news publishers, which rely on the search giant for the site traffic that underpins ad sales. Prakash was recruited to initially smooth any hardships Google had experienced with publishers, especially after the two recent antitrust trials. 

Google has been one of the greatest sources of traffic to publisher websites. In July, Google drove around 92% of all organic search traffic to brands. At the time, there was little evidence of any significant impact of AI or new entrants on market share or Google search queries, according to BrightEdge.

That has changed somewhat with the entrance of new AI-based search engines. 

A contention between publishers and Google is the use of their content to produce generative AI results in AI Overviews, which respond to search queries with a complete answer. Not all searches produce AI Overviews, but when they do, the content links to the publisher's sites as the source of information. 

Google has held discussions with publishers during the past year about compensation for the use of their content in training large language models (LLM). 

Google, OpenAI, Meta and other companies heavily involved with AI are placing greater emphasis on content from reputable news sources when training LLMs, according to a new study by Ziff Davis.