Amit Singhal, IITian behind Google Search, all set to retire soon

Amit Singhal held the most important position in Google. Till recently, he was the head of the company’s core search operations. He is one of the many IITians who keep working wonders while staying behind the scenes.

On February 26, 2016, Amit retired from Google after 15 years. He said, “I want to devote next 15 years of my life to those who are less fortunate.”

If you have been using Google Search on web or on mobile, you have been using the ideas conceived by Singhal’s team and features implemented by them. No doubt, the search engine remains the best in the world – even after the decade and a half.

Amit Singhal is a Google Fellow too – a prestigious title the company bestows only on its most distinguished engineers. Here are some of the interesting trivia about Amit Singhal:

1. Amit was born in Jhansi, UP. He still visits his family, friends and relatives in India.
2. He did BS in Computer Sciences from IIT Roorkee in 1989 before going to the US.
3. In the US, Singhal pursued MS in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota and PhD in Computer Science at Cornell University.
4. At Cornell, Amit studied from Prof Gerard Salton whom he describes as ‘one of the founders of the field of Information Retrieval’.
5. Amit used to work at AT&T’s Bell Labs before joining Google in 2000 – just two years after the company was found by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. His friend Krishna Bharat (the man behind Google News) convinced him to join Google.
6. Amit re-wrote Page’s original Google algorithm and made it better. This impressed Larry so much that he was put in charge of the Google’s best kept secret – its search algorithm – and was entrusted with the responsibility of keeping it fresh and relevant.
7. Danny Sullivan, the founder of the Search Engine Blog, compared Amit Singhal’s retirement from Google to Jonthan Ive leaving Apple (Jonathan is the Chief Design Officer of Apple).
8. Amit claims that he spent most of his boyhood days in the foothills of the Himalayas.
9. A big fan of Star Trek Universe, Singhal wants to build technologies shown in it such as the virtual assistant of the USS Enterprise that can understand voice commands.
10. Amit was the brain behind Google Now’s core feature – to search without searching – the intelligent personal assistant by Google for Android phones.

Amit credits Don Crouch (one of his teachers from University of Minnesota) for his success:

“Don gave me the love for search, I have just followed my passion ever since.”