{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"TechSurge: Deep Tech Podcast","title":"Google's Chief Technologist on Intelligent Search in the Age of AI","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4688,"description":"TechSurge is sponsored by Notion. From product roadmaps to investor updates, Notion is where modern teams plan, write, and ship together. Get started at http://notion.dev/techsurge.\nSearch began as a way to find pages. AI is turning it into a way to ask, reason, decide, and act.\n\nSearch has always been more than a technical problem. It is a way of organising knowledge, connecting intent with information, and increasingly, turning questions into actions. In the age of artificial intelligence, that basic function is being redefined.\nIn this episode of TechSurge, host Sriram Vishwanath speaks with Prabhakar Raghavan, Chief Technologist at Google, about the long arc of search: from the early web and link analysis to knowledge graphs, language models, transformers, Gemini, and the unresolved question of how AI will change the way we find, trust, and use information.\nPrabhakar reflects on his career as a computer scientist, researcher, and technology leader, beginning with his time at IBM Research, where he worked on algorithms, optimization, databases, and early information retrieval. He explains how the explosion of unstructured data on the web created a new class of technical and economic problems. Search was not simply about indexing pages; it was about imposing structure on a chaotic information environment and building mechanisms that could connect supply, demand, relevance, authority, and trust.\nThe conversation traces how early search evolved through link analysis and PageRank, drawing on ideas from scholarly citation analysis, graph theory, and algorithmic ranking. Prabhakar describes why authority and trust became central to search as the web grew, and why users themselves changed alongside the technology. As search engines became more capable, people moved from looking for simple webpages to asking richer, more contextual questions that required intent understanding rather than mere document retrieval.\nSriram and Prabhakar then explore the transition from...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/jQPF4l9NFf0J8GE3ySmQUhKsdFs-I1vwVANYFaBaoL0/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9kOGI1/OGFhMjdjOWMzMDhj/MGY4MGFiMDMyMmIx/Y2M4ZS5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}