Google Search Guru Singhal: We Will Try Outlandish Ideas
Posted on October 2, 2009 |
Inside Google’s search quality group, Amit Singhal runs the core ranking team, which is responsible for those algorithms you hear so much about. The team ran some 6,000 experiments last year that tried tweaking those mathematical formulas, ultimately producing between 450 and 500 small and large changes in Google’s search engine.
Singhal, a former researcher at AT&T Labs (the former Bell Labs), joined Google in 2000 and now is a Google Fellow, a title reserved for its most accomplished engineers. For a story on Google’s search efforts in the latest issue of BusinessWeek, he spoke to me about some of the inner workings of the team whose work determines the results you see after you type a query into Google.
This is the second in a series of four interviews with the leaders of Google's search quality team, following an interview posted yesterday with Udi Manber, VP of technology for search. Interviews with Scott Huffman, who runs search evaluation, and Matt Cutts, head of the anti-Web spam team, will run on Tech Beat on Saturday and Sunday. And if you want the big picture, we just posted an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
