Prabhakar Raghavan

SUMMARY: Prabhakar Raghavan has made important contributions to Internet and Web analysis, as well as online social networking, through his work at IBM, Yahoo! Research Labs, and Google.

Prabhakar Raghavan began his career in technologies in the late 1980s at IBM as a research staff member but was quickly promoted to senior manager of the computer science principles and methodologies department where he worked until 2000. In 2005, Raghavan became the head of Yahoo! Research Labs, where he pursues research in text and Web mining and algorithm design, in addition to overseeing the lab’s work until 2012. He was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering and as a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He is listed as a Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and a member of the editorial board of Internet Mathematics, a journal on the mathematics of managing huge databases like the Internet. Beginning in 2007, Raghavan served as a member of the board of trustees for the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Raghavan attended the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, where he earned his Bachelor’s of Technology in Electrical Engineering in 1981, before coming to the United States to complete his education with a Master’s of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley. While at Berkeley, Raghavan won the 1986 Machtey Award, given by the annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, for his paper “Probabilistic Construction of Deterministic Algorithms: Approximating Packing Integer Programs.”

In 2012, Raghavan began working for Google and eventually became a Senior Vice President in 2021.

Career

After graduate school, he worked for IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center and Almaden Research Center before becoming vice president and chief technology officer at Verity, Inc., an intellectual capital management software developer. Verity had first made its name with a text retrieval system called Topic that allowed users to search for the information they were looking for based on conceptual keywords, rather than being limited to searching for words actually in the text—much like Yahoo!’s later hierarchical organization of Web sites by topic. In 2005, Raghavan was hired to head the newly established Yahoo! Research Labs, the same year that Verity was bought out by rival Autonomy Corporation.

As head of Yahoo!’s labs, Raghavan spoke of the need to determine the science and mathematics underlying online communities and social networks, saying: “Is it better to pay a celebrity $10,000 to tweet about your product, or find 10,000 non-celebrities to tout you? The nascent research suggests your money is better spent on the crowd—but the key is finding the people who are slightly more influential than most.” Mathematicians, computer scientists, and social scientists work to understand the motivations and responses of online users. “We have this huge mountain of data, and it raises fascinating questions about how we can use that to better the experience for our users,” said Raghavan, who referred to researchers in this area as “Internet social scientists,” who combine mathematical analysis of large databases and algorithmic understanding with techniques from the social sciences and economics, including sociology and psychology. He noted that while his computer science education was heavily grounded in mathematics and engineering, he also believed that these other disciplines should become a fundamental component of a computer science education.

Raghavan's impact at Google helped launch him to his role as Senior Vice President (SVP). Prior to SVP, he was Vice President of Google Apps and Google Cloud. In 2018, he oversaw the Ads & Commerce teams, and in 2020, he took over for Ben Gomes as Head of Search. Raghavan has been known as one of the most senior authorities of the Search tool. This role, however, made Raghavan the subject of criticism for his part in incentivizing search engine optimized content and his diligence to gain the company revenue via search ads. The same year he took over, the United States Justice Department sued Google for abusing its power in online search and advertising. Raghavan testified on behalf of Google, stating that Google had a variety of competitors and alleging they were not partaking in illegal activities to thwart other companies or boost sales. However, in 2024, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled against Google, stating that the company is a monopoly and must be held accountable.

Raghavan also co-authored two graduate texts on algorithms and on search, Randomized Algorithms and Introduction to Information Retrieval. He has written over one hundred papers in various fields and holds twenty issued patents.

Bibliography

Barakat, Matthew. “Grandpa Google? Tech Giant Begins Antitrust Defense by Poking Fun at Its Status among Youth.” AP News, 26 Oct. 2023, apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-trial-search-engine-defense-21c59367d8db87ba16a0c0628f7b6fbc. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

“Google Loses Massive Antitrust Case over Its Search Dominance.” NPR, 5 Aug. 2024, www.npr.org/2024/08/05/nx-s1-5064624/google-justice-department-antitrust-search. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Raghavan, Prabhakar, C. D. Manning, and H. Schutze. Introduction to Information Retrieval. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

“Prabhakar Raghavan.” Google Research, research.google/people/prabhakarraghavan/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Singel, Ryan. “Yahoo Wants to Blind the Competition With Science.” Wired, www.wired.com/2010/08/yahoo-science/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.