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]
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]
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 by CEO Carol Bartz, who replaced the co-founder Jerry Yang in 2009 and was fired in 2011 as the company declined.[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 he replaced Ben Gomes as head of Google Search and Assistant,[20] amid a push to increase advertising revenue from Google Search.[21] In 2024, he transitioned to the role of Chief Technologist at Google.[2]
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]
Criticism
In April of 2024, the blogger Ed Zitron revealed 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.[31][32]
↑ Schütze, Hinrich; Christopher D. Manning; Raghavan, Prabhakar (2008). Introduction to information retrieval. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-86571-5.
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