Google Search Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan will become chief technologist, CEO Sundar Pichai confirms

Google’s Senior Vice President of Search and Ads, Prabhakar Raghavan, is leaving his position to take on the role of Google’s Chief Technologist. Google CEO Sundar Pichai made this announcement on October 17. It’s important to note that this decision comes at a time when Google is facing one of the biggest competitive challenges in a decade for its core search business. The ongoing shift in consumer behavior and increasing competition are proving to be a threat to Google’s monopoly in the market.

Pichai said in a letter to employees: “Prabhakar has decided it is time to make a big leap in his own career. After twelve years of leading teams at Google, he is returning to his computer science roots and will take on the role of Chief Technologist, Google,” MoneyControl reported. He added that in this role, Raghavan will work closely with Google leaders, including Pichai himself, to provide technical direction and leadership to help the company grow its culture of technology excellence.

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Nick Fox, a Google veteran and Raghavan team member, will replace him to lead Google’s knowledge and information products, including search, advertising, geospatial and commerce products.

Prabhakar Raghavan at Google

64-year-old Prabhakar Raghavan switched from Yahoo to Google in 2012. He initially served as vice president of Google Apps, Google Cloud, overseeing its engineering, products and user experience. He led the Gmail team in the launch of Smart Reply and Smart Compose.

He drove Gmail and Drive past 1 billion users. He then became vice president of Advertising, Commerce and Payments in 2018. He began overseeing Google Search and Assistant in 2020.

During his time at Google, Gemini was launched but was later discontinued due to the blunders it made. Raghavan publicly apologized in the company’s blog post for saying the feature “missed the mark” and outlined what Google did to fix the problem. Gemini resumed generating images of people in August.