Yahoo's secret weapon: the ex-IBMer who worked with Google's founders Prabhakar Raghavan may not be a household name, but the head of the Yahoo Labs team has a mission to innovate Jemima Kiss guardian.co.uk Tuesday 26 April 2011 16.57 BST Carol Bartz doesn't have an enviable job. The Yahoo chief executive charged with turning around the beleaguered web company in the face of stiff competition from Google and, increasingly, Facebook, has rolled out a dramatic series of staff cuts and cost cuts. But she struggled to convince analysts, following the company's latest financial results last week, that Yahoo is heading in the right direction. She was forced to admit that the much-vaunted search advertising partnership with Microsoft isn't proving as profitable as she had hoped, while a typically unflattering comparison with Google's results for the same quarter shows that Yahoo's revenues fell 24%, while Google's rose 27%. But if Bartz's style is to go down with all guns blazing, she may have a secret weapon. Deep under the bonnet of Yahoo's product development is Dr Prabhakar Raghavan, who founded Yahoo's scientific research lab in 2005. Raghavan's mission has been to ensure that state of the art scientific practices are at the centre of the company's search, advertising and communications products and his new focus, having installed chief scientists on all Yahoo products, is to drive even more product development. Bartz has described Yahoo Labs as the centrepiece of her strategy to turn the company around, and has just promoted Raghavan to Yahoo's executive board as chief strategy officer and executive vice-president. So what does his appointment mean for Yahoo – and can his methodical, research-based approach to innovation produce the kind of turnaround Yahoo needs? In the late 1990s, Raghavan was working at IBM and teaching at Palo Alto's Stanford University, researching search engines and link analysis. He wasn't the only one; the other team happened to be two precocious Stanford students called Larry Page and Sergey Brin. "The two teams had vigorous technical exchanges and seminars together," recalls Raghavan of the world's seminal work on link analysis. IBM resisted his efforts to explore consumer search, sticking to enterprise, and Raghavan eventually joined Yahoo under former chief executive Terry Semel in 2005. Read more.