Google is one of the most valuable tech companies in the world with a market cap of more than 2 trillion dollars. Although Google is currently involved in a range of businesses it is still popular as a search engine which is reportedly dying. As per a study by German academics, Google Search is getting worse. Google Search, one believed to be the gold standard of search engines, is reportedly losing when it comes to user experience due to more visibility of low-quality content due to poor optimization. Known podcaster and columnist Edward Zitron has accused an IIT graduate for killing Google Search. Although IIT graduates are known for their hard work, out of the box thinking and vision, Edward Zitron believes that one IIT graduate is a computer scientist class traitor who sided with the management consultancy sect. The IIT graduate that we are talking about is Prabhakar Raghavan. He is currently serving as the Senior Vice President at Google. He takes care of Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce and Payments products. Reports suggest that he received around Rs 300 crore salary from Google in 2022.
Zitron believes that Prabhakar Raghavan led ads team was not interested in maintaining search quality and pushed to prioritize growth metrics. Born and brought up in Bhopal, Raghavan’s mother was a physics and math teacher. He did his schooling from Campion School and went to IIT Madras to secure a Bachelor of Technology degree. He also has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Prabhakar was leading Yahoo! Labs before he decided to quit to join Google. At Yahoo, he was responsible for search and ad ranking, as well as ad marketplace design, and later served as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer. He also served as CTO at Verity, and held various positions over the course of 14 years at IBM with a focus on algorithms, data mining and machine learning.
