Ramanathan V. Guha is an Indian-born computer scientist. He is the creator of widely used web standards such as RSS, RDF and Schema.org. He is also responsible for products such as Google Custom Search. He was a co-founder of Epinions and Alpiri. He worked at Google for nearly two decades, most recently as a Google Fellow, before announcing his departure from the company in August 2024.
He has recently joined Microsoft as CVP and Technical Fellow, where he conceived and developed NLWeb.
Education
Guha did his schooling from Loyola High School, Pune and graduated with Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Master of Science from University of California, Berkeley and Ph.D from Stanford University.
Career
Guha was one of the early co-leaders of the Cyc Project where he worked from 1987 through 1994 at Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation in collaboration with Douglas Lenat.
Guha also contributed to the "smart browsing" features of Netscape 4.5 and was instrumental in Netscape's acquisition of NewHoo, which Netscape rebranded the Open Directory Project. He created the first version of RSS as part of a move in which the My.Netscape portal was opened to wider participation in March 1999. In 1999 he left Netscape and in May co-founded Epinions, where he worked until 2000. Guha founded Alpiri in late 2000 which created TAP, a semantic web application and knowledge base. In 2002, he became a researcher at IBM Almaden Research Center.
In 2005, Guha joined Google and became a Google Fellow. While at Google he has been responsible for Google Custom Search and a number of enhancements to Adwords. He is also one of the founders of Schema.org and Datacommons.org. After nearly two decades with the company, he announced his departure in August 2024.
Awards
On January 26, 2013, Guha was named as a Distinguished Alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
December 8, 2015 named as a ACM Fellow for contributions to structured data representation and specification and their impact on the Web