Prabhakar Raghavan, who has been running the Ads and Commerce teams since 2018, is replaced Ben Gomes as the head of Google Search and Assistant. Ben Gomes is still with Google, he is just moving to Google Education. Ben took over as head of Google Search in 2008 when he replaced John Giannandrea, who replaced Amit Singhal.

It seems some folks in the SEO community find it unusual that someone who lead up Google Ads for a couple years would jump to the organic side. Prabhakar Raghavan is more of a search guy than an ad guy, it is probably a much better fit for him than working on ads. So this might be a good move. Ben Gomes is a legend, but I assume after 20 years at Google, he is ready to step back a bit (my speculation). I am excited to see what this change will bring to Google Search.

This news comes from Search Engine Land where Greg Sterling wrote:

Prior to joining Google, Raghavan worked at Yahoo! Labs. Before that, Raghavan worked at IBM Research and later became senior vice president and chief technology officer at enterprise search vendor Verity. Now he is leading up the most important division in Google.

Prabhakar holds a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. His research background spans algorithms, web search and databases. He is the co-author of two widely-used graduate texts on algorithms and on search: Randomized Algorithms and Introduction to Information Retrieval; a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE; and was a Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. In 2009, he was awarded a Laurea honoris causa from the University of Bologna. He has served as editor in chief for the Journal of the ACM, has published over 100 papers in various fields and holds 20 issued patents, including several on link analysis for web search.

Search Engine Land has more, but it will be interesting to see if anything big changes with search with this new leadership change. Ben Gomes has been with Google for over 20 years.

Danny Sullivan, who has been covering search since before Google, who also now works at Google, wrote this on Twitter:

Here is how Prabhakar Raghavan responded:

And a bit more on his qualifications for search:

Also Jerry Dischler becomes the new head of Ads and Jen Fitzpatrick exits Maps and Geo for central engineering.

Forum discussion at Twitter.