Raghavan who was heading Ads and Commerce segments since 2018 would replace Ben Gomes, who would take on a new role in various Google education and learning initiatives, reports searchengineland.com, citing an internal email from Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
"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
"He published a foundational text on search and then went on to lead search teams at IBM and Yahoo. He joined Google in 2012 and prior to his current role worked with teams in Research, Geo, and Google Apps," he added.
Search encompasses News, Discover, Podcasts and Google Assistant.
Raghavan later founded the research lab at Yahoo after joining the company in 2005.
In 2010, he spoke about the concept of the "web of things" vs. the "web of objects" (documents).
"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," said Pichai.
Jen Fitzpatrick who has been with Google's Geo team for more than a decade and took over as its head six years ago, has now exited Maps/Geo to run the company's central engineering team, which has 8,000 employees.
Jerry Dischler who has been working on Google Ads for more than 10 years will not head the Ads division.