Google’s senior vice president of search and ads, Prabhakar Raghavan, is leaving his post to take on the role of Google’s chief technologist. Google CEO Sundar Pichai made the announcement on October 17. Importantly, the move comes as Google faces one of the biggest competitive challenges in a decade for its core search business. Current changes in consumer behavior and increasing competition are proving to be a threat to Google’s monopoly in the market.

Pichai, in a note to employees, said: “Prabhakar has decided it is time to take a big step forward in his own career. After 12 years leading teams within Google, he will return to his IT roots and will take on the role of Project Manager, Google,” MoneyControl reported. He added that in this role, Raghavan will work closely with Google executives, including Pichai himself, to provide technical direction and leadership to enable the company to develop its culture of technological excellence.

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Nick Fox, a Google veteran and member of Raghavan’s team, will replace him to lead Google’s knowledge and information products, which include search, ads, location and commerce products.

Prabhakar Raghavan at Google

Prabhakar Raghavan, 64, left Yahoo for Google in 2012. Initially, he worked as vice president of Google Apps, Google Cloud and oversaw engineering, product and user experience. He led the Gmail team to launch Smart Reply and Smart Compose.

It allowed Gmail and Drive to exceed one billion users. Then in 2018, he became vice president of advertising, commerce and payments. He began overseeing Google Search and Assistant in 2020.

During his time at Google, Gemini was launched, but was later discontinued due to the errors made. Raghavan, in the company blog, publicly apologized because the feature “missed the mark” and described what Google was doing to fix it. Gemini took over generating images of people in August.