WASHINGTON — Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan on Thursday (Oct 26) detailed challenges the search and advertising giant faces from smaller rivals, describing efforts to avoid becoming 'the next road kill'.
A woman holds her smart phone which displays the Google home page, in this picture illustration taken Feb 24, 2016.WASHINGTON — Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan on Thursday detailed challenges the search and advertising giant faces from smaller rivals, describing efforts to avoid becoming "the next road kill".
Raghavan, asked about a 1998 article about Yahoo!'s dominance of search at the time, said he was acutely aware rivals from Expedia.com to Instagram to TikTok competed for users' attention. Raghavan said Google had some 8,000 engineers and product managers working on search, with about 1,000 involved in search quality.
Raghavan said that Google faced different types of competitors, including general search where they compete against Microsoft's Bing and specialized search engines, such as the travel website Expedia.com. He described Amazon.com as one of the companies that he worried most about competing against.