)
Amit Singhal, Google's search chief, oversees the 200 or so factors that determine where websites rank in the company's search engine, which means he decides if your website lives or dies. His current challenge: Figuring how to spread that same fear and influence to mobile phones.
In a recent interview at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, Singhal laid out a widely-held thesis on why smartphones are fundamentally changing how people are consuming information: Phones have small screens that are annoying to type on, and people have grown so addicted to their phones that they carry these everywhere. Also, in a shift with big implications for his company's sway over the internet, smartphone users spend the bulk of their time on mobile apps instead of the open web on which Google built its business.
Add it all up, and "you have to rethink what search means, pretty much from first principles," Singhal says.
That helps explain why Singhal and his group are engaged in a race that has erupted across Silicon Valley to become the Google of apps. Singhal, an engineer born in India, joined Google in 2000. He has spent the past 15 years adding speed and intelligence to the Google search box, which is only 17 years old but already sits alongside the Golden Arches in terms of cultural and economic impact. Today, however, as people spend more time on mobile devices, competitors are popping up everywhere and Google, while still a fast-growing and highly profitable company, is slipping in its position as gateway to the internet.
Venture capitalists are funding new search start-ups that treat information and the web as legacy products and focus on actions and apps instead. And, while Google, with $65 billion in the bank, can buy any start-up it chooses to, one company it cannot buy - Apple - is also joining the mobile search fray. On Thursday, Apple released an early, or 'beta', version of the next version of its iOS mobile software, giving iPhone and iPad users the ability to tap Apple's own search engine for searches of music, apps and local services, allowing them to potentially bypass Google.
Google is a mobile force in many ways: In the US and several other countries, search queries to Google on mobile devices now outrank search queries on desktops and laptops. It has the world's largest mobile operating system, Android. It makes billions of dollars a year selling apps through the Google Play Store and owns many of the world's most popular apps, such as YouTube.
But that has created competing priorities because apps have also diluted its position in search. Google claimed 68 per cent of mobile search revenue in the US last year, according to research firm eMarketer. That lead, while still substantial, was down from 81 per cent in 2012, a decline projected to continue as apps occupy more of people's time.
"On a phone, the biggest intellectual difference is you don't go to your search box as your first resort," says Keith Rabois, partner at venture capital firm Khosla Ventures and who has invested in a search start-up called Relcy. "On a watch, it's inconceivable that you would go to a search box, perhaps at all."
John Lilly, venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, says the real prize in mobile search is "whoever figures what questions people really want to ask their phones while they are walking around and how they will ask those questions". That is "very unlikely to look like it did five years ago, when you typed it into a box", he adds.
Singhal and his group are trying to get ahead of all this with a combination of offence and defence.
He and his team have moved to reinforce the golden goose that is Google's web-based search engine by updating its ranking algorithms so that the websites it deems mobile-unfriendly fall in search rankings. And, they have spent five years building products such as the Knowledge Graph, which answers queries. That adds power to tools such as voice search and produces instant results that smartphone users appreciate because if the answer is right, they can simply glance at their phone and move on, without having to click anything.
In June, Singhal's group also introduced Now on Tap, an ambitious project that will be available on Android-based phones that will embed search inside features such as text messages and apps. That lets people search more easily on mobile - just do a long tap on the home screen button -without having to cut and paste words or type into a search box.
"My job is not to only look at the trend today. My job is to look at what's beyond the horizon," Singhal said in the interview. "And, beyond the horizon, there is so much more people can do on their devices that is not possible today."
Singhal, 47, was born in Uttar Pradesh and grew up on the edge of the Himalayas. He came to the US in 1990 to secure a master's degree at the University of Minnesota. Later, he received a doctorate in computer science from Cornell University, where he studied with Gerard Salton, a pioneer in the information retrieval field, which laid the foundation for the algorithmic searches that we now use to find plane tickets. "Back then, I always found myself in cold places," Singhal says on his personal website. He was working at AT&T's Bell Labs when he was asked to join Google in 2000 by Krishna Bharat, an engineer who created Google News.
©2015 The New York Times News Service
