It’s a brand new world for search engines like Google. Google’s head of Search, Prabhakar Raghavan, is preparing his team for that new world. At a recent all-hands meeting in Mountain View, Raghavan stated that it’s not the same as it was 15-20 years ago, around the time that Google first debuted its search engine.
He also noted that, no matter what happens, people still come to Google for answers. Whether they get a new gadget or a gizmo, they still head to Google to get answers because Google is trusted. Despite what other companies – like Perplexity – want you to believe.
During this meeting, Raghavan stated that his reports will have less time to complete some projects as part of a push to pick up the case in key areas. Google is also going to start building teams closer to growing markets. Primarily India and Brazil. Raghavan also underscored the importance of Google’s reputation amid the changing tech landscape. Obviously, Google’s Gemini is in steep competition with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. We expect to see quite a few announcements for Gemini and other AI products at Google I/O next month.
This comes after quite a bit of consolidation in Mountain View
This meeting that Raghavan had with the Search team, comes just days after some other consolidation at Google. Recently, Google has been consolidating the teams behind its AI models in its Research and DeepMind divisions. This is going to help accelerate the build-up of its AI capabilities.
Google also recently announced that it was merging its Android, Chrome, and hardware divisions under a new “Platform and Devices” team. This is also being done with a similar goal of moving faster on both hardware and software. Google’s Hardware SVP, Rick Osterloh, will be the lead of this new team, while Hiroshi Lockheimer will be headed to “some new projects” at Google, after serving as head of software platforms like Android and Chrome.
All of this shows us that Google is not resting on its laurels. It’s making big changes, and hoping for big results here. Obviously, Artificial Intelligence is a bit of a threat to its core business – which is Search and Ads. Around 70% of its revenue in the past quarter was from Ads. That’s down a bit from a few years ago when it was closer to 90%. That just shows that Google is diversifying its revenue streams. Merging AI teams together, as well as Android, Chrome, and Hardware, into a single team is going to help there, too.