Prabhakar Raghavan

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Prabhakar Raghavan
Prabhakar Raghavan.png
Prabhakar Raghavan receiving a Laurea honoris causa from the University of Bologna, 2009
Born (1960-09-25) September 25, 1960 (age 63)[ citation needed ]
Alma mater University of California Berkeley,
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Campion School, Bhopal
Scientific career
Institutions Google
University of California Berkeley,
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Yahoo! Labs
Stanford University
IBM
Thesis Randomized Rounding and Discrete Ham-Sandwich Theorems: Provably Good Algorithms for Routing and Packing Problems (Integer Programming)  (1987)
Doctoral advisor Clark D. Thompson [1]
Website research.google.com/pubs/PrabhakarRaghavan.html

Prabhakar Raghavan is a senior vice president at Google, where he is responsible for Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products. [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]

Contents

Early life and education

Prabhakar holds a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. [3]

Career

Prabhakar worked at IBM Research in the 1990s. [11] According to a 2011 interview with The Guardian , Raghavan taught at Stanford University around the time the Google founders worked there. [12]

He was also senior vice president and chief technology officer at enterprise search vendor Verity. [13]

Prabhakar ran Yahoo! Labs from 2005 to 2012, working on a variety of projects including search and advertising. [12] [14] In 2012 Prabhakar joined Google. [15] In 2020 he was Head of Ads at Google and took over the role of Head of Search from Ben Gomes, [16] amid a push to increase advertising revenue from Google Search. [17]

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). [18] From 2003 to 2009, Prabhakar was the editor-in-chief of Journal of the ACM . [19]

In 1986, Prabhakar received the Machtey Award for Best Student Paper.[ citation needed ] In 2000, he was named a fellow of the IEEE; [20] received the Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems; [21] and received the Best Paper Award at the Ninth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW9). [22] In 2002, Prabhakar was named a fellow of the ACM. [23] He received the 2006 Distinguished Alumnus Award, UC Berkeley Division of Computer Science. [24] In 2008, Prabhakar was made a member of the National Academy of Engineering, [25] 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. [26]

Criticism

In 2024, Raghavan became the face of declining quality at Google [27] [28] for his takeover of Google search and subsequent focus on ad revenue in the prioritization of search results.

Google-internal documents show that in 2019, there was growing concern [29] by long-time Googlers, most notably Ben Gomes, that Search was at risk of focusing on short-term revenue increases ("growth") over results quality. Gomes, then head of search, began a campaign [30] to push back against pressure for "growth" by the Ads team. Soon thereafter, Google leadership removed Gomes as head of search, replacing him with none other than the head of the Ads team, Raghavan. In the time since Raghavan's takeover of Google Search, its reputation for high quality has suffered, seemingly for the first time in Google's history [31] [32] .

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References

  1. ↑ "Randomized Rounding And Discrete Ham-Sandwich Theorems: Provably Good Algorithms for Routing and Packing Problems". UC Berkeley. Retrieved 19 May 2014. Advisor: Clark D. Thompson
  2. ↑ "Prabhakar Raghavan – Google Research". Google Research. Retrieved 2021-01-14.
  3. 1 2 "Prabhakar Raghavan". Executive Profile. Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved 1 May 2024.
  4. ↑ Raghavan, Prabhakar; Motwani, Rajeev (1995). Randomized algorithms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0-521-47465-8.
  5. ↑ Raghavan, Prabhakar (2012). "Rajeev Motwani (1962-2009)" (PDF). Theory of Computing. 8: 55–57. doi: 10.4086/toc.2012.v008a003 .
  6. ↑ Schütze, Hinrich; Christopher D. Manning; Raghavan, Prabhakar (2008). Introduction to information retrieval. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0-521-86571-5.
  7. ↑ Prabhakar Raghavan at DBLP Bibliography Server OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  8. ↑ Broder, A.; Kumar, R.; Maghoul, F.; Raghavan, P.; Rajagopalan, S.; Stata, R.; Tomkins, A.; Wiener, J. (2000). "Graph structure in the Web". Computer Networks. 33 (1–6): 309–320. doi:10.1016/S1389-1286(00)00083-9.
  9. ↑ Prabhakar Raghavan author profile page at the ACM Digital Library OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  10. ↑ Prabhakar Raghavan's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  11. ↑ Farber, Dan. "Yahoo's new search master". Between the Lines Blog. ZDNet. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  12. 1 2 Kiss, Jemima (26 April 2011). "Yahoo's secret weapon: the ex-IBMer who worked with Google's founders". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 April 2024.
  13. ↑ "Prabhakar Raghavan | CDSS at UC Berkeley". cdss.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-06.
  14. ↑ Reisinger, Don (2012-03-05). "Yahoo Labs chief, strategist jumps to Google, report says". CNET. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  15. ↑ Swisher, Kara (2012-03-04). "Yahoo Labs Head Raghavan Departing to Google". AllThingsD. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  16. ↑ Sterling, Greg (2020-06-04). "Google promotes Prabhakar Raghavan to lead Search, replacing Ben Gomes". Search Engine Land. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  17. ↑ AdExchanger (2024-04-24). "The Fin Tech Ad Tech Boom; Temu Tops Meta's Charts (But At What Cost?)". AdExchanger. Retrieved 2024-04-25.
  18. ↑ "Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan". Company Info. Yahoo! News Center. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  19. ↑ "History". Journal of the ACM. Archived from the original on 26 October 2011. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  20. ↑ "IEEE Fellows: R". IEEE Fellows. IEEE. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  21. ↑ "Department of Computer Science 1999-2000 Annual Report". Cornell University. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  22. ↑ "2000 IBM Research Computer Science Best Paper Awards". IBM Computer Science. IBM. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  23. ↑ "Verity Executive Prabhakar Raghavan Inducted as an ACM Fellow". News & Events. Autonomy.com. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  24. ↑ "Distinguished Alumni". Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  25. ↑ "National Academy of Engineering Elects 65 Members and Nine Foreign Associates". News. National Academies. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  26. ↑ https://www.iw3c2.org/ToT/PressRelease-3rdToT-20170405.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  27. ↑ "The Men Who Killed Google".
  28. ↑ "The Man Who Killed Google".
  29. ↑ "Court Records" (PDF).
  30. ↑ "Court Records" (PDF).
  31. ↑ "Google Search Engine Sucks Now".
  32. ↑ "Google Search Sucks Now".
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