He was their first Director of Search Quality, and then switched to being Director of Research. IIRC he had a VP over him when I left (2014), but was still largely calling the shots in Research. Google Research had some very large wins come out of them in the mid/late 00s - their speech recognition and machine translation programs came out of that.
AIUI Norvig was also instrumental in Google's research philosophy, which is to embed research teams alongside the products they're developing rather than having a separate research lab that throws papers over the wall for later implementation. Somewhat ironic, given that he ended up heading the dedicated Research department, but Research was viewed as sort of an incubator whose successful projects would be "adopted" by some other product team. He's the reason machine-learning is pervasive at Google and ordinary SWEs use TensorFlow, rather than it being the sole province of Ph.Ds.
AIUI Norvig was also instrumental in Google's research philosophy, which is to embed research teams alongside the products they're developing rather than having a separate research lab that throws papers over the wall for later implementation. Somewhat ironic, given that he ended up heading the dedicated Research department, but Research was viewed as sort of an incubator whose successful projects would be "adopted" by some other product team. He's the reason machine-learning is pervasive at Google and ordinary SWEs use TensorFlow, rather than it being the sole province of Ph.Ds.