Computer scientist Prabhakar Raghavan, who used to be the face of Google search, will become the company’s Chief Technologist. Raghavan was the senior vice president at Google, overseeing Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments.
“Prabhakar has decided it’s time to make a big leap in his own career. After 12 years leading teams across Google, he’ll return to his computer science roots and take on the role of Chief Technologist, Google,” CEO Sundar Pichai wrote.
Apart from his role at Google, Prabhakar Raghavan is widely known for his research in web information retrieval, algorithms, and databases. He also co-authored two influential textbooks: Randomized Algorithms and Introduction to Information Retrieval.
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Early Life and Education
Prabhakar Raghavan spent his early years in various cities, including Bhopal, Madras (now Chennai), and Manchester.
He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in 1981.
The next year, he obtained a Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Then, Prabhakar Raghavan pursued a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1986.
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Career
After earning his doctorate, Prabhakar joined IBM, where he spent 14 years in various research positions. He started as a research staff member at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and later became a manager of the theory of computing. In 1995, he moved to the Almaden Center in Silicon Valley, where he led the Computer Science Principles and Methodologies Department. His research group focused on several fields, including algorithms, complexity theory, cryptography, and text mining.
In the late 1990s, while still at IBM, Prabhakar also worked as a consulting professor at Stanford University. His team at Stanford conducted research alongside another team led by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the future founders of Google.
In 2004, after leaving IBM, Prabhakar became the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Verity, an enterprise search vendor. A year later, Yahoo! hired him to lead Yahoo! Research, where he worked on projects related to search and advertising. In 2011, he was appointed as Yahoo!’s Chief Strategy Officer.
Prabhakar joined Google in 2012 after Yahoo! significantly reduced its research funding. Initially, he worked on Google Ads and Commerce. In 2020, he became the Head of Search, succeeding Ben Gomes. Four years later, he was replaced by Nick Fox.
On October 17, 2024, Sundar Pichai shared a memo with Google employees, announcing significant changes to Google’s products and hierarchy. It also revealed that Prabhakar Raghavan would step down from his current role and become the Chief Technologist.
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Awards and Honors
Prabhakar Raghavan has received several prestigious awards throughout his career. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
His accolades include the Machtey Award for Best Student Paper in 1986, the Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems in 2000, and the Seoul Test of Time Award in 2017. He has also been honored as a Distinguished Alumnus by both UC Berkeley and IIT Madras.
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