Prabhakar Raghavan

Early life and education

Prabhakar was born in India and spent his youth in Bhopal, Madras and Manchester. 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.

Prabhakar continued his education at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 1986.

Career

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. 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. 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.

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.

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

In 2012, Prabhakar joined Google after severe funding cuts in Yahoo!'s research division. 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.

In 2024, he transitioned to the role of Chief Technologist at Google, leaving his tenure as Head of Search.

Raghavan has published over 100 papers in various fields and has secured 20 issued patents.

Awards and honors

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). From 2003 to 2009, Prabhakar was the editor-in-chief of Journal of the ACM.

In 1986, Prabhakar received the Machtey Award for Best Student Paper. In 2000, he was named a fellow of the IEEE; received the Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems; and received the Best Paper Award at the Ninth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW9). In 2002, Prabhakar was named a fellow of the ACM. He received the 2006 Distinguished Alumnus Award, UC Berkeley Division of Computer Science. In 2008, Prabhakar was made a member of the National Academy of Engineering, 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.

Criticism

In April of 2024, the blogger Ed Zitron wrote a piece claiming that 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.

References

References

1. "Randomized Rounding And Discrete Ham-Sandwich Theorems: Provably Good Algorithms for Routing and Packing Problems". UC Berkeley.
2. Roth, Emma. (2024-10-17). "Google is replacing the exec in charge of Search and ads".
3. "Prabhakar Raghavan". Bloomberg Businessweek.
4. (1995). "Randomized algorithms". Cambridge University Press.
5. (2012). "Rajeev Motwani (1962-2009)". Theory of Computing.
6. (2008). "Introduction to information retrieval". Cambridge University Press.
7. {{DBLP
8. (2000). "Graph structure in the Web". Computer Networks.
9. {{ACMPortal
10. {{Scopus
11. (2006-03-31). "The driving force behind Yahoo Research". CNET.
12. "Curriculum Vitae".
13. "Prabhakar Raghavan".
14. Farber, Dan. "Yahoo's new search master". ZDNet.
15. (26 April 2011). "Yahoo's secret weapon: the ex-IBMer who worked with Google's founders". The Guardian.
16. "Prabhakar Raghavan {{!}} CDSS at UC Berkeley".
17. . (2005-07-28). ["Yahoo! Appoints Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan to Lead Research Efforts"](https://www.altaba.com/static-files/b939898f-4737-462e-ad31-354b3614815e). *Yahoo!*.
18. Reisinger, Don. (2012-03-05). "Yahoo Labs chief, strategist jumps to Google, report says".
19. Swisher, Kara. (2012-03-04). "Yahoo Labs Head Raghavan Departing to Google".
20. Sterling, Greg. (2020-06-04). "Google promotes Prabhakar Raghavan to lead Search, replacing Ben Gomes".
21. Levy, Steven. "Prabhakar Raghavan Isn’t CEO of Google—He Just Runs the Place". Wired.
22. (2024-10-18). "This Indian-origin executive is Google's new chief technologist". The Economic Times.
23. "Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan". Yahoo! News Center.
24. "History". Journal of the ACM.
25. (October 1986). "Machtey Award". IEEE Computer Society.
26. "IEEE Fellows: R". IEEE.
27. "Department of Computer Science 1999-2000 Annual Report". Cornell University.
28. "2000 IBM Research Computer Science Best Paper Awards". IBM.
29. "Verity Executive Prabhakar Raghavan Inducted as an ACM Fellow". Autonomy.com.
30. "Distinguished Alumni". Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
31. "National Academy of Engineering Elects 65 Members and Nine Foreign Associates". National Academies.
32. "IW3C2 - ToT Awards".
33. (April 25, 2024). "Report: How Prabhakar Raghavan Killed Google Search". Search Engine Roundtable.
34. Frauenfelder, Mark. (April 23, 2024). "How one power-hungry leader destroyed Google search". Boing Boing.