Internet

Google News Exec Heading Publisher Relationships Resigns 11/12/2024 – MediaPost Communications


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. 

advertisement

advertisement

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.

Chatbots get their information and
give media companies like Ziff Davis, the Chicago Tribune, News Corp, The New York Times and others more leverage when seeking copyright protection or
payment for material used by AI.

In the paper, the research analyzes the details of training data from major LLM company research teams and analyzes the datasets. It shows that LLM
training datasets are disproportionately composed of high-quality content owned by commercial publishers of news and media websites.

Major LLM companies have prioritized this content in
training the most important LLMs.





READ SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.