Requiem for Raghavan

Last week, Prabhakar Raghavan was relieved of duty as Senior Vice President of Search, becoming Google's "Chief Technologist." 

An important rule to follow with somebody's title in Silicon Valley is that if you can't tell what it means, it probably doesn't mean anything. The most notorious example of this is when AOL employed "Shingy," a Digital Prophet, and if you have any information about what he did at AOL, please email me at ed@ezpr.com immediately.

Although ostensibly less ridiculous, Raghavan has likely been given a ceremonial title and a job that involves "partnering closely with Sundar Pichai and providing technical direction," as opposed to actually leading it.

Back in April, I published probably my most well-known piece — The Man Who Killed Google Search. Using emails revealed as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust trial against Google over search, it told the tale of how Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google's head of ads, led a coup that began the slow descent of the world's most important website toward its current, half-broken form. 

The key event in the piece is a “Code Yellow” crisis declared in 2019 by Google’s ads and finance teams, which had forecast a disappointing quarter. In response, Raghavan pushed Ben Gomes — the erstwhile head of Google Search, and a genuine pioneer in search technology — to increase the number of queries people made by any means necessary. 

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