Born in India in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Google Fellow, Amit
Singhal spent most of his boyhood in the foothills of the
Himalayas. Today, the Himalayan connection continues, as Singhal is
the person responsible for keeping Google on top of the search
mountain. One of the world’s four Google Fellows, Singhal is
the man who rewrote Google’s ranking algorithm written by the
legendary duo of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Singhal loves search
and even after 20 years, says that he still comes in every day at
Google, feeling the enthusiasm and curiosity of a kid in a candy
store.
In an exclusive interview with
Srikanth RP from
InformationWeek, Singhal explains why India will drive the
mobile search market, how Google is innovating to match the
information needs of tomorrow, and how tomorrow’s search
engine will serve you information proactively even before you ask
it.
What would be your definition of the ideal
search engine? Is Google an ideal search engine?
An ideal search engine must give me the information that I want
instantly. While we are ahead of our competitors, we still have a
lot to achieve since whenever we come close to becoming an ideal
search engine, the goal post moves. Every time we tweak our
algorithm, the expectations of people go beyond what is expected.
This is what pushes us and motivates us to constantly keep on
tweaking our algorithms to improve our search results. While the
algorithms are built by us, the intelligence comes from the
hundreds of millions of searches that occur every day.
Press reports say that Google ran close to
6000 experiments last year tweaking mathematical formulas and
algorithms. Can you describe some of the innovative stuff that you
have done that you think has translated into huge customer
satisfaction?
Experiments are the key for unleashing tiny waves of innovation. As
information needs are becoming more complex, we learn a lot from
every query that is entered into Google. Whenever we get a query
that has not matched expectations, we sit and analyze on what has
gone wrong. For instance, we observe how people change words or use
combinations of words in their queries. This has helped us improve
the efficiency of our search. For example, the word
‘GM’ could mean General Motors or Genetically Modified.
If I search for GM cars, I should only get documents related to
General Motors cars and not documents that are related to food. The
trick is in identifying the context. We have also learnt immensely
from local examples. We also allow our people to build their
craziest ideas, which help us stay ahead of the curve.
What will tomorrow’s search engine
look like?
Tomorrow, I want my search engine to serve me my queries even
before I ask for it. This is possible because even today, my mobile
phone has my personal information such as say, a to-do list, my
meetings and my location. When you combine this information and use
this in conjunction with say, Google Maps, you can intelligently
serve information to the end user. For example, imagine that I have
to buy a new cricket bat for my son, and I have say, half an hour
left before my next meeting. The mobile phone knows that I have to
buy a cricket bat by using the information from my to-do list. It
also has information on my meetings from my schedule. It only needs
my location and local area information. So the moment, I am in a
particular area at a particular time, the search engine can using
information ping me a message saying that a local shop which is
close to the location that I am in has a nice cricket bat. This
will be of course driven by keeping in mind user privacy concerns,
and the level of control that users want.
Your view on the future of mobile search,
and what does it represent for India?
Mobile phones clearly outnumber the number of PCs and represent the
future of search. Today’s smartphones are capable of
delivering search using a number of modes including voice, location
or sight. I believe that India is uniquely poised to lead the world
in mobile search. This is primarily because of a unique combination
of some major trends that are playing out in the Indian market.
India is one of the fastest growing markets in terms of mobile
phone subscriber base. With the advent of 3G, and a proliferation
of large screen devices, the mobile phone can become the preferred
device for accessing the Internet. Finally, the price at which the
Internet can be accessed is coming down in India. This unique
combination will enable India to lead the mobile search market.
Our past experience shows that we can take one product from one
country and take it to other markets. For example, our Indian team
delivered Google Mapmaker, a tool that allows users to add their
own landmarks to Google Maps. This innovative idea was born in
India, and now has been taken to the rest of the world. This tool
is now available in more than hundred countries.
You have said that search is still an unsolved problem and we're
committed to making it faster and easier for people to access a
greater diversity of information. For example, in a blog post, you
have described capturing a snippet of audio and have the search
engine identify and analyze it. How close are we to this idea
today?
We are very close. Today, Google voice search is going at a fast
pace. Technically, we can provide the technology which will enable
users to input a audio or video snippet, and have the search engine
identify it. While we have not provided this to users, as this is
not a big need, we can make it happen. For example, whenever any
user uploads a video in Youtube, we have the capability to
automatically analyze the video and audio content and match it with
legitimate sources. This helps us weed out content which is not
copied and posted without permission. We also have the capability
to automatically transcribe videos.
After a long time, Google does have some
serious competition. What do you think of the
competition?
The best thing about the competition is that it our users benefit.
We would hate to be in an industry where we are not challenged.
Competition is fundamentally good for the industry. For us, the
philosophy remains simple – focus on the user and everything
else will follow.