Google decides to make changes in the company’s leadership. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai has announced, that the senior vice president who was in charge of search, ads, and other important segments is stepping down to the role of chief technologist, in a memo to staff posted on Thursday.
‘Prabhakar has decided right now is the time to make a giant leap in his own career’, Pichai adds. He has spent the last 12 years leading teams at Google and is now returning to his roots in computer science as Chief Technologist. The responsibility includes; Prabhakar will partner closely with Pichai and Google leads to provide technical direction and leadership and grow the culture of tech excellence.
Since 2018, Prabhakar has overseen ads and commerce and then he was promoted to the role of head of the Google Search and Assistant in 2020. One of his team members, Nick Fox will be leading Goggle’s Search, ads, geo, and commerce divisions, which were earlier taken over by Prabhakar. According to Pichai, Fox has helped to launch products such as Google Fi and RCS messaging.
Shuffling over the roles isn’t confined to Prabhakar, the company has decided to shuffle some other roles. The division in charge of Google’s Gemini app, directed by Sissie Hsaio, will join Google DeepMind under CEO Demis Hassabis. The Google Assistant team will now integrate into Google’s platforms and devices team.
Google is taking a great step forward particularly in the field of Artificial Intelligence to establish itself as a leading force in this area. Google is also facing some serious challenges under pressure due to legal and regulatory challenges. The US government has breakup Google in its search business into a monopoly, which means that it dominates the market to the extent it represses competition. If the government proves this, it could force the company to break into smaller entities in order to lower its market control and cheer up competition.
When looking back to the career of Prabhakar at Google, he has faced some serious criticisms. In April, Ed Zitron raised his concerns regarding the direction of Google Search under Prabhakar’s leadership. Prabhakar’s background was not clean in advertisements also, rather than search technology he was prioritizing revenue over search quality.
When Prabhakar was in charge, Google called back or reduced some importance of its product or services. This was allegedly performed to boost engagement metrics and ad venue, possibly at the expense of user experience.
Since 2019, internal emails have been cited as a ‘Code Yellow’ emergency at Google due to descending search revenues. At that time, Prabhakar was in charge of the Ads division. In response, Google allegedly started promoting which was downranked earlier for using spam tactics. However, Google has disputed many of these accusations, insisting that the advertising system does not affect the organic search results, which means ads and search rankings are kept separate.
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