Meet Prabhakar Raghavan, New Head Of Google Search

Google has announced that it has appointed Prabhakar Raghavan as the head of Search and Assistant.?

Raghavan will be taking over the position from Ben Gomes who is shifting to a new role in the organisation and will report to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Google/ Reuters

Reported first by Search Engine Land, Raghavan has been working at Google since 2012 and was initially appointed as the head for Google’s advertising and commerce business in 2018. This included supervision of search display and video advertising analytics, shopping, payments etc.

Prabhakar Raghavan at Google

Before becoming the head for Google’s advertising and commerce business, he served as the Vice President of Google Apps as well as Google Cloud services, overseeing the development and user experience. Before Google, he’s worked on multiple roles at tech conglomerates like IBM as well as the search engine giant Yahoo.

At Google, Raghavan has been responsible for growing both Gmail and Drive past 1 billion monthly active users and bringing in numerous machine intelligence features in G Suite, including Smart Reply, Smart Compose, Drive Quick Access.

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Prabhakar Raghavan education background

Prabhakar holds a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has also completed his Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai made the announcement to company employees stating, "For Prabhakar, this new role brings his experience with search full circle. He's spent more than two decades obsessing over algorithms and ranking, and his association with Google Search predates Google."

He added, "A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Prabhakar is one of the most respected engineering minds in our field. His experience working across so many of our product areas gives him the perfect lens to spot the seams between them."

The advertising business that was under Prabhakar Raghavan’s wing will now be taken over b by Jerry Dischler, who will continue reporting to Raghavan. Dischler currently leads the product and engineering team for Google ads business.