Google Shakes Up Top Search, Advertising Leadership

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is shaking up its leadership, putting control over the company’s search engine and advertising product teams under the same person and moving leaders who have been around since the company’s founding to less visible teams.

I remember Ben Gomes from his Improving Search for the next 20 years post from 2018. He talked about three fundamental shifts in how they think about Search:

• The shift from answers to journeys: To help you resume tasks where you left off and learn new interests and hobbies, we’re bringing new features to Search that help you with ongoing information needs.
• The shift from queries to providing a queryless way to get to information: We can surface relevant information related to your interests, even when you don’t have a specific query in mind.
• And the shift from text to a more visual way of finding information: We’re bringing more visual content to Search and completely redesigning Google Images to help you find information more easily.

If you look at search today you will see how those things have taken shape in the search we are used to now. I am sad to see him moving away from search.

Prabhakar Raghavan, who led advertising product since 2018, will replace Ben Gomes as head of search. The new advertising product chief, Jerry Dischler, will report to Raghavan, signaling that the two groups will now be run by one central leader.

Will be interesting to see what sort of changes this will bring to Search.