Prabhakar Raghavan

Prabhakar Raghavan is a Senior Vice President at Google. He is responsible for Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce and Payments products. Raghavan is one of the foremost authorities on Search and is the co-author of two widely-used graduate texts on algorithms and on search: Randomized Algorithms and Introduction to Information Retrieval. He has over 20 years of research spanning algorithms, web search and databases, published over 100 papers in various fields, and holds 20 issued patents, including several on link analysis for web search.

Previously, he served as Vice President of Google Apps, Google Cloud, overseeing engineering, products and user experience. Under his leadership, the Apps business expanded from a set of consumer apps to an enterprise solution that is a major contributor to Google’s Cloud business. He also grew both Gmail and Drive past 1 billion MAUs and introduced a number of machine intelligence features in G Suite, including Smart Reply, Smart Compose, Drive Quick Access — each leading to measurable improvements in user experience.

In 2018, he became responsible for the Ads & Commerce teams, including search, display and video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments, and travel. He’s helped drive double-digit growth, while remaining centered on longstanding principles of user trust and fair value exchange among users, publishers, and advertisers.

Prior to joining Google, Raghavan founded and led Yahoo! Labs where he was responsible for search and ad ranking, as well as ad marketplace design, and later served as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer. He also served as CTO at Verity, and held various positions over the course of 14 years at IBM with a focus on algorithms, data mining and machine learning.

Raghavan holds a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE; a former editor in chief for the Journal of the ACM; and was a Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. In 2009, he was awarded a Laurea honoris causa from the University of Bologna.