The human search engine

I have a dream: Amit Singhal wants to recreate the Star Trek communicator of his childhood

For the man who describes his job as "being in charge of the world's search", Amit Singhal has a simple dream - to built the Star Trek communicator he saw on his family's black-and-white TV while growing up in India.

Sitting inside Google's vast, sprawling headquarters in Mountain View, Silicon Valley, Amit is, despite 11 years at the search firm, still a man possessed. "I come in like a child in a candy store, I'm jumping up and down because I have this amazing team brimming with new ideas," he says.

"That team is doing such amazing science, and bringing me closer to my childhood dream - how does it get any better?"

Singhal's role at Google is simple - he is the man in charge of search. When he arrived at the firm 11 years ago, following a spell at AT&T in New York, one of his first jobs was to rewrite the algorithm that powers Google's search engine.

"I came in and said 'I'm a search academic, why don't you let me practise that?' I didn't really read the Google code, and wrote a parallel version, telling them, 'This is how I would do it".

That project was adopted as the core of Google's entire operation, and is still powering more than a billion searches carried out every day.

His job now includes overseeing near- constant updates to the code, continually tweaking it to make life easier for users. "My original algorithm has become a foundation on which we have an even more beautiful building.

"When I built the original foundation it was the best house we knew how to build back then. We soon realised that we could add rooms to the house, we added a new fixture, a basement or other area. Meanwhile we are constantly trying to pull it down and try again, building foundations to try.

"We have the entire web in a sandbox that only our engineers can see, and our engineers can take their new algorithm and see it change millions of queries. If it works, we send it to testers, whom we pay, but we don't tell them what they are testing.

"If the tweaks are still deemed useful they are unleashed into the wild - but only to some users.

"Then we take a tiny slice, one per cent of our users, and expose them to this change. We measure things such as where on the page they click, when they click higher - that's good for us.

"That one per cent are not told but it's just an experimental algorithm, and the changes are potentially beneficial, so not hurting the user's experience.

"Concurrently we have approximately 100 ideas floating around that people are testing - we test thousands in a year. Last year we ran around 20,000 experiments. Clearly they don't all make it out there but we run the process very scientifically."

Once the tests are done, a report is built by an independent statistician. "We look at that with a group of senior people who come together every week, and we decide if it's good for users, the web ecosystem and for our systems."

While most know Google as a computer-based search engine, Singhal plans to change that, and the firm's voice-search capabilities are already astonishingly advanced.

He demonstrates its translating service, speaking into his phone in English. Seconds later a perfect translation in Spanish is spoken by the handset, allowing him to hold conversations in dozens of languages, which image search can also translate as text.

"I can go to Japan and take a picture of the menu, which is translated so that I can figure things out," he says.

However, there is still some way to go, he admits. "Search engines are still at the information stage. Our objective is to make this a source of knowledge for our users."

To explain the future of Google, Singhal uses an odd example - the Big Mac. "If you have a Big Mac meal, I can give you a bit of data about how much fat it has. That's just data, you don't know if it's good or bad. Then I show you a nutrition chart and explain that it's more than 100 per cent of your daily intake - so it is converted into information. Then you watch the film Super Size Me, and it is turned into knowledge - and some day you will become wise and only eat salads."

But still the ultimate aim for Singhal is to build the Star Trek communicator of his childhood. "The key to this is when you can have a Star Trek Googlephone, where you can say, 'Google, tell me how Alfred Nobel made his money'.

You can seek any knowledge on demand. How much more productive would humanity be if we can achieve this? "Today I feel more excited about my dream, it is almost within grasp," says Singhal.


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