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Prabhakar Raghavan

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Prabhakar Raghavan
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 materUniversity of California Berkeley,
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Campion School, Bhopal
Scientific career
InstitutionsGoogle
University of California Berkeley,
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Yahoo! Labs
Stanford University
IBM
ThesisRandomized Rounding and Discrete Ham-Sandwich Theorems: Provably Good Algorithms for Routing and Packing Problems (Integer Programming) (1987)
Doctoral advisorClark D. Thompson[1]
Websiteresearch.google.com/pubs/PrabhakarRaghavan.html

Prabhakar Raghavan is a business executive and former researcher of web information retrieval. He 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]

Early life and education[edit]

Prabhakar spent his youth in Bhopal, Madras and Manchester.[11] In 1981, he earned a bachelor 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]

Career[edit]

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!, 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 2020 he was Head of Ads at Google and took over the role of Head of Search from Ben Gomes,[20] amid a push to increase advertising revenue from Google Search.[21]

Awards and honors[edit]

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]

Criticism[edit]

In 2024, Raghavan became the face of declining quality at Google[31][32] 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[33] 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[34] 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.[35][36]

References[edit]

  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. ^ "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 Edit this at Wikidata
  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 Edit this at Wikidata
  10. ^ Prabhakar Raghavan's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  11. ^ "The driving force behind Yahoo Research". CNET. 2006-03-31. Archived from the original on 2024-06-07. Retrieved 2024-06-07.
  12. ^ a b c d e "Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-08-02. Retrieved 2024-06-07.
  13. ^ a b "Prabhakar Raghavan". Archived from the original on 1999-02-20.
  14. ^ a b Farber, Dan. "Yahoo's new search master". Between the Lines Blog. ZDNet. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  15. ^ a b Kiss, Jemima (26 April 2011). "Yahoo's secret weapon: the ex-IBMer who worked with Google's founders". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 April 2024.
  16. ^ "Prabhakar Raghavan | CDSS at UC Berkeley". cdss.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-06.
  17. ^ "Yahoo! Appoints Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan to Lead Research Efforts" (Press release). Sunnyvale, California: Yahoo!. 2005-07-28. Retrieved 2024-06-06.
  18. ^ Reisinger, Don (2012-03-05). "Yahoo Labs chief, strategist jumps to Google, report says". CNET. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  19. ^ a b Swisher, Kara (2012-03-04). "Yahoo Labs Head Raghavan Departing to Google". AllThingsD. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  20. ^ Sterling, Greg (2020-06-04). "Google promotes Prabhakar Raghavan to lead Search, replacing Ben Gomes". Search Engine Land. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  21. ^ AdExchanger (2024-04-24). "The Fin Tech Ad Tech Boom; Temu Tops Meta's Charts (But At What Cost?)". AdExchanger. Retrieved 2024-04-25.
  22. ^ "Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan". Company Info. Yahoo! News Center. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  23. ^ "History". Journal of the ACM. Archived from the original on 26 October 2011. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  24. ^ "IEEE Fellows: R". IEEE Fellows. IEEE. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  25. ^ "Department of Computer Science 1999-2000 Annual Report". Cornell University. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  26. ^ "2000 IBM Research Computer Science Best Paper Awards". IBM Computer Science. IBM. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  27. ^ "Verity Executive Prabhakar Raghavan Inducted as an ACM Fellow". News & Events. Autonomy.com. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  28. ^ "Distinguished Alumni". Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  29. ^ "National Academy of Engineering Elects 65 Members and Nine Foreign Associates". News. National Academies. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  30. ^ https://www.iw3c2.org/ToT/PressRelease-3rdToT-20170405.pdf [bare URL PDF]
  31. ^ "The Men Who Killed Google".
  32. ^ "The Man Who Killed Google".
  33. ^ "Court Records" (PDF).
  34. ^ "Court Records" (PDF).
  35. ^ "Google Search Engine Sucks Now".
  36. ^ "Google Search Sucks Now".
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