"Now search is becoming mobile - on phones and tablets. The challenge is that it is on a small screen, so it's hard to type. The opportunity is that it's got a really good microphone and a touch screen," he said.
"It can enable a new kind of interface. So we realised we want to build an interface that was much like the way you talk to some person and ask a question," Gomes said.
The Tanzania-born, India-bred, US-educated vice-president of search is responsible for helping to answer queries in the shortest time possible on desktops, tablets and phones.
Search is Google's cash cow, bringing in a majority of its USD 50 billion revenues last year. It is also, said Gomes, "about having a continuous conversation with the user to find out what he wants".
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Described by BBC as a "boy-like 45-year-old guru of search in Googleplex", the company headquarters in Mountain View, California, Gomes works out of an untidy cubicle with four other top engineers.
He said: "When I joined Google in 1999, search was about basically finding the words that you search for in a document. Then we took this view that we were going to understand what you want and give you what you need."
Trawling through over 20 billion webpages a day, Gomes and his "army of search" - a substantial number of Google's 44,000 employees - use algorithms to make search intuitive, multimedia and super smart.
Gomes is especially proud of Knowledge Graph, a new function launched last year to make the site's algorithms "act more human" in an attempt to offer instant answers to search questions.
Google handles 100-billion plus searches every month, or over three billion a day. A good 15 per cent of the search questions it sees every day are new.
When Gomes joined Google in 1999 after a stint in Sun Microsystems working on Java programming language, some searches could take up to 20 seconds. Today a search for Ben Gomes on Google shows about 19,000,000 results in .28 seconds.