Prabhakar Raghavan to run Google search replacing Ben Gomes
Yesterday, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, announced that Prabhakar Raghavan would head the company’s search business, which includes news, discover, podcasts and Google assistant. In 2019, the business brought in nearly $100 billion in revenues for the company.
A search expert who expected Google to fail
Raghavan has “spent more than two decades obsessing over algorithms and ranking, and his association with Google Search predates … Google. He published a foundational text on search and then went on to lead search teams at IBM and Yahoo,” Pichai noted in an email announcement to employees.
In 1998, Larry Page and Sergei Brin were among the students in the first search class in computer science at Stanford University taught by Raghavan. The Google co-founders, “…two bright students were working on search algorithms. I would talk to them and one day they said they were starting a company and wanted me to (join them.) I said no, you'll never make any money,” Prabhakar Raghavan told a marketing magazine The Drum.
Raghavan spent 14 years at IBM with a focus on algorithms, data mining and machine learning. In 2005, he joined Yahoo, where he founded and led Yahoo! Labs and was responsible for search and advertising ranking, as well as ad marketplace design. He later served as Yahoo’s Chief Strategy Officer. Earlier, he was the Chief Technology Officer at Verity, a Silicon Valley based business infrastructure software company.
The fortunes of the companies where Raghavan worked varied widely. In 2016, Yahoo was acquired by Verizon, a telecommunications company, for $4.8 billion, compared to its peak valuation of $125 billion during the dot com bubble in 1999. IBM has a current market value of $117 billion, while Google has a market value of $982 billion.
Joins Google’s research team
In 2012, Raghavan joined Google initially working on research, in its search and mobile location businesses. Then, as a vice president, he ran the company’s Apps business, which includes Gmail, Docs, Drive and Calendar, as well Google Cloud, overseeing engineering, products and user experience. Under his leadership, the Apps business expanded from a set of consumer applications to an enterprise solution for businesses, which is now a major contributor to Google’s Cloud revenues. He also grew both Gmail and Drive past 1 billion users and introduced a number of machine intelligence features in G Suite, including Smart Reply, Smart Compose, Drive Quick Access — each leading to measurable improvements in user experience.
In 2018, as a senior vice president, Raghavan took over Google’s Advertising and Commerce operations from Sridhar Ramaswamy who left the company to become a partner at Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm in the Silicon Valley. In his new position, Raghavan oversaw search, display and video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments, and travel. He was also responsible for infrastructure teams that provide much of the software behind the company’s search, advertising and other groups.
Prabhakar got a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.S. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He has co-authored over 100 research papers on algorithms, web search and databases and holds 20 issued patents, including several on link analysis for web search. He is the co-author of two widely-used graduate texts on algorithms and on search: Randomized Algorithms and Introduction to Information Retrieval. He served as the editor in chief for the Journal of the ACM. the leading computer science journal.
Ben Gomes builds Google’s search engine
Raghavan will replace Ben Gomes, who after two decades “building (Google) Search from the ground up,” will move to head the company’s efforts to tie learning — across areas like Education and Arts & Culture — more closely to its products and “core user experiences,” said Pichai.
In 1997, after finishing a Ph.D. in computer science from University of California Berkeley, Gomes began working at Sun Microsystems on the Java programming language. A year later, a Berkeley classmate told him he had joined a small start–up in Mountain View, California. "He told me it seemed like a really good place with really good people," Gomes said in an interview with a Berkeley alumni magazine, talking about his decision to join Google.
In 1999, the year after Raghavan declined to join Google, Ben Gomes began working at Google, barely a few months after its founding and despite the search engine start-up facing large, well-funded competitors like Yahoo, AltaVista, and Excite. He was closely involved in the early search algorithms and, in subsequent years, was part of every fundamental change that happened in search
Google’s stock, which went public in 2004 at around $40 a share, is now worth $1440 a share, a 3,600% gain. It is very likely that early employees like Gomes got options at far below the initial $40 offering price. So as a founding and senior engineer, Gomes may have a net worth of at least $100 million, in addition to an income of over $1 million a year, including stock options.
Born in Africa and raised in Bangalore, India, Gomes and a school friend, Krishna Bharat, learned about computers by playing around with a ZX Spectrum, an eight–bit home computer released in 1982. "We were both chemistry geeks, and we used to have contests to push the limits of this tiny computer" with very little information on how it worked, he told a UC Berkeley alumni magazine. He received his bachelor's degree from Case Western University in Ohio, and began graduate studies at UC Berkeley in 1990.
Gomes said that his study of Hindi reinforced his appreciation of Google Assistant, a voice activated device. “Many languages in developing nations have never really had common keyboards – I studied Hindi for 10 years, but I wouldn’t know how to type it – so voice is much easier to use than typing,” he told The Guardian
