Prabhakar Raghavan

Prabhakar Raghavan is a business executive and former researcher of web information retrieval. He currently holds the role of Chief Technologist at Google.^[2] His research spans algorithms, web search and databases.^[3] He is the co-author of the textbooks Randomized Algorithms^[4] with Rajeev Motwani ^[5] and Introduction to Information Retrieval.^{[6] [7] [8] [9] [10]}

Prabhakar was born in India and spent his youth in Bhopal, Madras and Manchester.^[11] In 1981, he earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, followed by a Master of Science in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982.^[12]

Prabhakar continued his education at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 1986.^{[13] [12]}

After completing his doctorate, Prabhakar worked in various research positions at IBM. He began as a research staff member at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. In 1994, he was promoted to manager of theory of computing.^[12] A year later, he relocated to the Almaden center in Silicon Valley to become the senior manager of the computer science principles and methodologies department of IBM Research until 2000.^{[14] [12]} His research group focused on algorithms, complexity theory, cryptography, text mining, and other fields. While working for IBM in the late 1990s, he was also a consulting professor at Stanford University.^[13]

Raghavan's research team at Stanford co-existed with another researching search engines that included students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who later founded Google.^[15]

After working 14 years at IBM, he became senior vice president and chief technology officer at enterprise search vendor Verity in 2004.^{[16] [14] [12]} In July 2005, he was hired by Yahoo! to lead Yahoo! Research in Sunnyvale, California.^[17] At Yahoo!, he worked on research projects including search and advertising.^{[15] [18]} In 2011, he was appointed as Yahoo!'s chief strategy officer.^[19]

In 2012, Prabhakar joined Google after severe funding cuts in Yahoo!'s research division.^[19] In 2018, he was put in charge of Ads and Commerce at Google and in 2020 his scope was expanded to include Search, Geo, and Assistant.^{[20] [21]}

In 2024, he transitioned to the role of Chief Technologist at Google.^[2]

Prabhakar is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).^[22] From 2003 to 2009, Prabhakar was the editor-in-chief of Journal of the ACM .^[23]

In 1986, Prabhakar received the Machtey Award for Best Student Paper.^{[citation needed ]} In 2000, he was named a fellow of the IEEE;^[24] received the Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems;^[25] and received the Best Paper Award at the Ninth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW9).^[26] In 2002, Prabhakar was named a fellow of the ACM.^[27] He received the 2006 Distinguished Alumnus Award, UC Berkeley Division of Computer Science.^[28] In 2008, Prabhakar was made a member of the National Academy of Engineering,^[29] and in 2009, he was awarded a Laurea honoris causa from the University of Bologna. In 2012, he was named a Distinguished Alumnus by the IIT Madras. In 2017, Prabhakar and co-authors received the Seoul test of time award for their 2000 paper "Graph Structure in the Web" at the WWW conference.^[30]

In April of 2024, the blogger Ed Zitron revealed Raghavan was responsible for a massive decline in quality at Google following his takeover of Google Search and subsequent focus on ad revenue in the prioritization of search results. ^{[31] [32]}

• Yahoo! employees
• IBM employees
• American chief executives
• American computer businesspeople
• American computer scientists
• Living people
• University of California, Berkeley alumni
• Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
• Indian emigrants to the United States
• Indian computer scientists
• 20th-century Indian mathematicians
• IIT Madras alumni
• Google employees

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