Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan wishes to achieve iconic breakthroughs in the search engine space; he hopes to make human-human interactions on the web – one in which the machine and the Internet become irrelevant – a reality, and is propelled by the desire to see his contribution rank beside Xerox Parc’s human-computer interaction breakthrough.
For the uninitiated, Raghavan is the head of Research at Yahoo, his efforts dovetailed towards developing ‘social search’ – a broad effort to enhance computerized Web search tools with insights gained from mining the collective knowledge of its users. After getting on board Yahoo in June 2005, the 45-year old scientist has devoted most of his energies towards identifying and working on the thrust areas that constitute the linchpin of Yahoo’s strategy in taking on its arch rivals:

Search and information retrieval, which is all about matching queries with people.

Machine-learning/ data mining, which would concern discerning user behavior from the 12 terabytes of data that flows into Yahoo on a daily basis. Responding to the need for an expert in the field, Raghavan hired web retrieval and mining expert Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates to head the company’s Web search and data mining focused research labs in Spain and Chile.

Microeconomics: A tremendously consequential aspect to the development of online business. Explains Raghavan, “Earlier, research constituted code-writing by an engineer, the marketing arm would then take over.” Today we have moved into an era where monetising aspects are intertwined with engineering advances; the code writing process has to driven by the microeconomic concerns of how the potential product can help ratchet up the revenues. This calls for an involvement of people with microeconomic thinking right up front in the research stage. Realizing this, Raghavan brought on board former Harvard professor and economist Michael Schwarz within months of joining Yahoo. Primary among Schwarz’s contributions have been the query incentive networks, implemented on Yahoo Answers. Under the incentive system, users accumulate points based on their activities; more points leads to recognition within the community, central to keeping the user hooked.

Community Systems: The challenge in this arena was about identifying the right set of middleware that would drive the Internet applications central to Yahoo’s strategy. The middleware would have to make sense of how people in an online community strike friendships, the trust factor, and recommendation on ratings of a book/ movie/ play by users. Raghavan’s thoughts in this area were crystallized after he hired Raghu Ramakrishnan, Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a researcher on databases. Ramakrishnan has been instrumental in the development of community based search mechanism, currently running in the pilot mode.