Google takes yet another crack at e-commerce with renewed strategy

Raghavan is the first Google executive to oversee the technical operations behind both search and the ads division since Sundar Pichai did in 2014, shortly before he became CEO

Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan recently had an issue with his rose bushes. His wife took a photo of the plants on her phone, uploaded the image to Google, identified the culprit and followed a link for a fungicide. Then she bought it.

A seamless transaction that didn’t involve typing into a search bar, it was a real-life test of sorts for Raghavan’s strategic vision. A senior vice president responsible for most of Google’s largest services—search, maps, advertising and more—the 61-year-old executive is determined to crack e-commerce, a market projected to hit $2.27 trillion in 2025 that the Alphabet Inc. division has