American tech giant Google has appointed Indian-origin tech executive Prabhakar Raghavan as the new head of its Search and Assistant division. Raghavan will be succeeding Ben Gome, who will be given a new role and will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai.
Prabhakar completed his Bachelor of Technology from IIT Madras and holds a PhD from UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Raghavan joined Google in 2012 and was made the head for Google’s advertising and commerce business in 2018. This department included supervision of search display and video advertising analytics, shopping, payments etc.
Prabhakar was earlier the Vice President of Google Apps as well as Google Cloud services as well.
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced this move to his employees.
"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," Picai said.
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."