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is Google's Chief Technologist.

Prabhakar 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.

He joined Google in 2012. Most recently, as Google's Senior Vice President for Knowledge & Information (K&I), Prabhakar was responsible for Google’s Search, Ads, Commerce, Geo, Assistant & Gemini products. Under his leadership of K&I, Prabhakar and team introduced AI Overviews in Search, new search modalities like multisearch with Google Lens and Circle to Search, and rebuilt core Search infrastructure, significantly reducing end-user latency and low-quality, unoriginal content in search results. Before that, he was Vice President of Workspace in Google Cloud, during which he led the Gmail team that launched Smart Reply and Smart Compose, some of the earliest instances of generative AI in consumer products. Before joining Google, Prabhakar founded and led Yahoo! Labs. He also served as CTO at Verity, and was at IBM Research for 14 years.

Prabhakar 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. In 2017, the International World Wide Web Conference Committee conferred the 2017 Seoul Test of Time Award to Prabhakar and his co-authors of the 2000 paper "Graph Structure in the Web," recognizing it as a seminal discovery in understanding the structure of the Web. He has received best paper awards from the IEEE Foundations of Computer Science, ACM Principles of Database Systems and the WWW conferences.