Andrei Broder

Andrei Zary Broder
Born	(1953-04-12) April 12, 1953 Bucharest, Romania
Occupation(s)	Computer scientist, technology executive
Years active	1970s–present
Known for	Development of algorithms for web search and computational advertising, CAPTCHA co-inventor, founding computational advertising field
Notable work	w-shingling, min-hashing, CAPTCHA, web query classification framework

Andrei Zary Broder (born April 12, 1953) is a renowned scientist currently affiliated with Google. His previous roles include research fellow and vice president of computational advertising at Yahoo!, as well as vice president of research at AltaVista. Earlier in his career, he was a distinguished engineer at IBM Research and served as CTO of IBM's Institute for Search and Text Analysis.

Education and career

Born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1953 to parents who were medical professionals, Broder relocated to Israel in 1973 during his studies in electronics at the Politehnica University of Bucharest. He transferred to the Electrical Engineering Department at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, graduating with highest honors (summa cum laude) in 1977. He later completed his doctorate under the supervision of Donald Knuth at Stanford University in 1985.

Broder began his professional journey at the newly established DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, where he contributed significantly to the early stages of AltaVista, focusing on issues like duplicate content and spam. Following AltaVista’s separation from Compaq, he assumed leadership roles including CTO, chief scientist, and vice president of research.

In 2002, Broder joined IBM Research to work on enterprise search technologies. He returned to Silicon Valley in 2005 as a Yahoo Fellow and vice president, where he was instrumental in founding computational advertising—a field dedicated to optimizing ad placement based on user behavior and context—and helped expand Yahoo! Research into a premier web research institution. Recognized for his contributions to web science, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2010. In 2012, Broder joined Google as a distinguished scientist specializing in large-scale personalization.

Contributions

In 1989, Broder independently developed an algorithm for creating a uniform spanning tree within graphs.

Throughout the last fifteen years, Broder has been a pioneer behind several foundational algorithms and concepts critical to web technology. In 1997, he spearheaded the creation of the first scalable method for detecting near-duplicate documents on the web by introducing techniques such as "shingling" and "min-hashing," which laid the groundwork for locality-sensitive hashing. The following year, he co-developed the initial practical test designed to prevent automated bots from impersonating humans on websites, now known as CAPTCHA. In 2000, during his tenure at AltaVista alongside colleagues from IBM and DEC SRC, he performed the inaugural large-scale examination of the Web’s graph structure and identified its characteristic bow-tie shape. Between 2001 and 2002, Broder proposed a widely adopted framework categorizing web queries into navigational, informational, and transactional types, thereby differentiating traditional information retrieval from Web search paradigms.

Awards and honors

Broder holds fellowships with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), National Academy of Engineering, and IEEE. He earned the ACM Paris Kanellakis Award twice: first in 2012 for his innovations involving w-shingling and min-hashing, and again in 2020 together with Yossi Azar, Anna Karlin, Michael Mitzenmacher, and Eli Upfal for their collaborative work on the power of two choices.