Google Exec Emphasizes Need for Innovation to Avoid Becoming ‘Roadkill’

During a recent discussion, Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google executive, highlighted the obstacles posed by smaller competitors to the search and advertising company. He emphasized the importance of taking measures to prevent Google from being overshadowed by these rivals and suffering a similar fate.

Raghavan testified in an ongoing antitrust trial in a lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice and a coalition of state prosecutors alleging that Alphabet’s Google illegally abused its dominant position in the search engine market to maintain its monopoly.

Asked about a 1998 article about Yahoo!’s search dominance at the time, Raghavan said he was well aware of competitors from Expedia.com to Instagram and TikTok competing for users’ attention.

“I feel strongly that I’m not going to be the next roadkill,” said Raghavan, Google’s executive vice president who reports to CEO Sundar Pichai.

Raghavan said Google had about 8,000 engineers and product managers working on search, with about 1,000 involved in search quality.

Raghavan’s description of Google struggling to keep up was at odds with the Justice Department’s depiction of the behemoth breaking antitrust laws to maintain its dominance of online search and some parts of advertising, including paying an estimated $10 billion a year to smartphone makers and wireless carriers by default. search engine in devices. Google’s share of the search engine market is almost 90%.

Raghavan said Google faced a variety of competitors, including general search, where they compete against Microsoft’s Bing, and specialized search engines such as travel site Expedia.com. He described Amazon.com as one of the companies he was most worried about competing with.

Young people have started searching video-sharing app TikTok and other social media apps, he said. “Where the young go, the parents follow,” he said.

When asked about the phrase “Big Google”, Raghavan said “unfortunately yes”, he had heard it. “Big Google helps with homework, for example, but when it comes to interesting things, they go elsewhere,” he said.

The trial began in September and will end in mid-November.