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

2024 was a grim year for Google and a grimmer one for Raghavan, starting in February with its Gemini Large Language Model generating racially diverse nazis (among other things), a mess that Raghavan himself had to apologize for. A few months later, Google introduced AI-powered search summaries that told users to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, which only caused people to remember exactly how bad Google Search already was, and laugh at how the only way that Google seemed to be able to innovate was to make it worse.

Raghavan is being replaced by Nick Fox, a former McKinsey guy who, in the emails I called attention to in The Man Who Killed Google Search, told Ben Gomes that making Google Search more profitable was “the new reality of their jobs,” to which Ben Gomes responded by saying that he was “concerned that growth [was] all that [Google was] thinking about.”