[ DITN = Desis In The News ]
Sometimes you come across a story that covers not just one topic you play close interest to, but two. That's what happened with "Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine," a piece in Sunday's New York Times. It covers two things I monitor: Google (see my notes on "Better Googling" at Sreetips.com) and South Asian stuff (see everything I have written about on SAJAforum!). The Google part of it is worth reading for anyone who uses the web - ie, you. But here we discuss the desi stuff, so let's do that.
Reporter Saul Hansell spent a day at the famously-secretive Google, getting a peek at some of its efforts to stay ahead of its rivals. An engineer named Amit Singhal, it turns out, is at the heart of those efforts.
Google often finds what users want, but it doesn’t always.
That’s why Amit Singhal and hundreds of other Google engineers are constantly tweaking the company’s search engine in an elusive quest to close the gap between often and always.
Mr. Singhal is the master of what Google calls its “ranking algorithm” — the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user’s question. It is a crucial part of Google’s inner sanctum, a department called “search quality” that the company treats like a state secret. Google rarely allows outsiders to visit the unit, and it has been cautious about allowing Mr. Singhal to speak with the news media about the magical, mathematical brew inside the millions of black boxes that power its search engine.
Google values Mr. Singhal and his team so highly for the most basic of competitive reasons. It believes that its ability to decrease the number of times it leaves searchers disappointed is crucial to fending off ever fiercer attacks from the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft and preserving the tidy advertising gold mine that search represents.
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“Search over the last few years has moved from ‘Give me what I typed’ to ‘Give me what I want,’ ” says Mr. Singhal, a 39-year-old native of India who joined Google in 2000 and is now a Google Fellow, the designation the company reserves for its elite engineers.Google recently allowed a reporter from The New York Times to spend a day with Mr. Singhal and others in the search-quality team, observing some internal meetings and talking to several top engineers. There were many questions that Google wouldn’t answer. But the engineers still explained more than they ever have before in the news media about how their search system works.
There are lots of other Singhal sightings in the piece. To learn more about Singhal, see his official bio, at Singhal.info (which explains via Google Maps, of course, that he spent most of his boyhood in the foothills of the Himalayas).
Reax? Post your thoughts in the comments section.
