10 ms·

Amit Singhal, an Influential Engineer at Google, Will Retire

284 points by sonabinu 11y ago

w1ntermute 11y ago
As discussed in Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo![0], Mayer's feud with Singhal was responsible for her 'demotion' to Google's Maps/local team, and eventual departure for Yahoo!: > Singhal loathed how, when his team was ready to roll out a change, Mayer would insist it pass through her UI review—a process that could take weeks. … > [I]n 2010, Larry Page decided that Google was moving too slowly. He wanted the whole company to move as fast as its Android and Chrome divisions. > One impetus for this decision was a memo from a longtime Googler named Urs Hölzle. It reminded everyone that social networks, and Facebook in particular, had become a dominant force on the Internet. It said that Google was nearly blind to all the knowledge stored on Facebook. Hölzle pleaded with his colleagues to focus on social media, or else the company could be swept away in an oncoming wave. > Page took the memo to heart, and put Vic Gundotra in charge of developing a social network for Google. The project was code-named Emerald Sea, after a Japanese painting in which a boat is about to be wiped out by a huge wave. Gundotra’s team built a prototype in a hundred days. > The speed impressed Page. He realized that one thing Android, Chrome, and the Emerald Sea project had in common was that each had a single person in charge. He wondered if it was time to put one person in charge of search. > Gundotra, suddenly vested with influence thanks to the Emerald Sea project, made it known that he did not like working with Mayer. With all her reviews and processes, she slowed things down too much. > Page thought about the future of Google and its past. To him, the strength of the company was that it developed machines that could learn what humans wanted and then provide it to them. He believed that Singhal better understood how to make the technology that powered those machines. Page believed that made Singhal more capable of pushing Google products to their technological limits…He summoned Mayer into a one-on-one meeting and told her she was done working on Google search. 0: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LLIJ22W http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LLIJ22W
- wavefunction 11y ago
  >knowledge stored on Facebook A questionable assertion.
  - awa 11y ago
    All of my local recommendations (handyman, local photographer, where to buy tomatoes) have now shifted to facebook groups. I no longer google handyman in blah, xyz. instead I go through my saved posts in FB. This is along with local city news and news from friends and family that is all on facebook. e.g. One of my colleague's (and friend) kid was in ER last weekend so on Monday during standup I was able to tell the rest of the folks that he was out due to family emergency without getting an email from him...
    - kumarm 11y ago
      [All of my local recommendations (handyman, local photographer, where to buy tomatoes) have now shifted to facebook groups. I no longer google handyman in blah, xyz. instead I go through my saved posts in FB.] In my local area NextDoor is replacing FB completely for any local recommendations, news, Alerts.
  - mwfunk 11y ago
    Not questionable at all- it's a gold mine for knowledge of value to advertisers. Every post, like, etc. on Facebook is spontaneously coming from a user. You don't have to infer what people love or hate based on browser and search history, you just let them tell you (and all their friends) what they love or hate. They're literally telling you what you should advertise to them, it doesn't get better than that for businesses driven by ad revenue (not a negative judgement, just an observation). Of course Google would want that data, and of course Facebook would want to prevent them from getting it.
    - zaphar 11y ago
      The caveat being that on the level of the user it's more like (love, sort of like, guilted into saying you liked) vs (hate, feel kind of meh about, guilted into saying your hated). The aggregation of those likes is more useful but at the individual user level it's a terrible signal. Especially since the entire social structure of the network is geared toward getting you to click like whether you actually like it or now.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  I don’t know if it has anything to do with Mayer/lack of review per se, or if it’s more about the scattered focus of G+, Android, etc., or if companies of a certain size are just inevitably incapable of solid UI implementation, or what, but Google’s UI polish on its flagship browser apps has taken a nosedive in the past 5–6 years. They used to be lightweight, fast, and reliable. Now they are bloated monstrosities packed with weird glitches that devour browser resources.
  - w1ntermute 11y ago
    I think Mayer's direct focus was more on UI than on performance, although a simple UI could certainly lead to better performance: > One time, an APM brought a product to [Mayer] for review and she told him, “This page is too busy. What you need to do is look at every font on the page, every font size. And every time you see a new color or a new font size, you add up a point. I want this page below five points.” > The comment about “five points” ended up in the meeting notes, and then it became a rule. No pages with more than five points. > Another rule was: Design a product for the “98 percent use” case. For Mayer, the best example of a product that followed this rule was the Xerox copy machine. It could do all kinds of fancy things: staple, collate, copy, and fax. But if you walked up to one and pressed the giant green button, the right thing just happened. Mayer believed on every good product there should be a big button like that for the 98 percent use case, where if the user clicks it or taps it, they get a delightful, fluid, simple experience. > During a product review, Mayer would count the number of keystrokes it took to get every job done. Too many, and it was back to work.
    - jmknoll 11y ago
      These are great product guidelines. Especially the 98% use case. Are these from the book linked in the parent comment? Or do you have a source with more ideas along these lines?
      - w1ntermute 11y ago
        Yes, it's from the same book.
- magicalist 11y ago
  I don't see how that quote indicates that her "feud with Singhal was responsible for her 'demotion'...and eventual departure". I'll admit that I generally dislike these books that construct a simple narrative out of anecdotes out of years of time, so I'm mostly responding because it's disappointing that this is the only top comment right now. And (assuming it's true), believe it or not he's not the first person to resent someone bringing their expertise to bear on their baby, regardless of merit.
  - w1ntermute 11y ago
    To continue: > In October 2010, it was made official. Mayer was removed from the top of Google’s search organization and put in charge of Google Maps and other “local” products. > Technically, this was a lateral move, if not a promotion, because Mayer retained her vice-president title and she was, at the same time, given a seat on Google’s operating committee—then-CEO Eric Schmidt’s round table of top executives from the company. > In reality, it was a demotion. Mayer was no longer in charge of what Google’s most important product looked like or how it worked. At Google, there was search, which generates nearly all of the company’s revenues and profits, and then there was everything else. Running Google search, Mayer was managing the most important product at the world’s most important Internet company. Running Google Maps, she was not.
    - magicalist 11y ago
      At best are you trying to argue for a "feud" with Larry Page?
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - w1ntermute 11y ago
        > Page consulted with [SVP of Engineering Bill] Coughran. Coughran said he could no longer peacefully referee what was becoming an increasingly hostile relationship between Singhal and Mayer. Coughran said that a couple times a week, one or the other would be in his office, complaining and asking to lead the organization. > “We’re going to have to pick somebody here,” he told Page. The feud was with Singhal. Page only picked the winner. I'd recommend you just read the book (the quotes are from chapter 6).
- nostrademons 11y ago
  It's interesting to see printed descriptions of events that I lived through. (I worked on projects sponsored by both of them, and was also loaned out to help with the Emerald Sea launch.) Some are echoes of the truth, but there are also some fairly big inaccuracies. Emerald Sea didn't have anything close to a prototype that could ship in 100 days. At best, there were a few technology demos from individual engineers. Urs sent his memo in March 2010; Emerald Sea launched as Google+ in June 2011, with the +1 button (done by David Byttow, who later attained infamy as the founder of Secret) launching a couple months earlier. Vic had few if any dealings with Marissa. She was moved to Geo in Oct 2010; at the time, Emerald Sea was a few scattered tech demos. The push to integrate G+ into everything Google didn't really start until after G+ launched in June 2011. Larry was impressed by speed, but I think that his exemplars were much more Android and Chrome than Emerald Sea. Mayer and Singhal had a very confused reporting relationship - basically, the engineers reported up to Singhal and the PMs reported up to Mayer. I wasn't close enough to them to know how well they got along personally, only that they both had very strong opinions and a lot of experience to back them up. It did make for some very slow product decisions as PMs had to get both of them to sign off on a change.
boomzilla 11y ago
Ok, wild guess here but Sundar is cleaning out the house? It's kind of hard to give direction to some who's been there forever, actually achieved more technologically and financially, and more critically would not listen to you. No wonder Larry decided to create Alphabet, stayed out of all the office politics. I would take a bet that Jeff Dean and Urs Holzle will leave in the next year or two.
- boulos 11y ago
  I'll take that bet. What are your terms? They must both leave by Feb 3, 2018 (and I would not count some sort of alphabet-like spin out as "leaving").
  - eitally 11y ago
    Heh, me too. He says that so nonchalantly it's obvious he has no personal experience with any of them.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
hackaflocka 11y ago
Does anyone know why the Google search results page had 2 copies of the top navbar for a while? One with a ghastly black background? Was that Marissa or Singhal?
- danblick 11y ago
  Seriously? You don't get to be a senior vice president by picking background colors.
  - geodel 11y ago
    Though you can be CEO by redesigning a logo :-)
pfarnsworth 11y ago
Google owes a great deal of our success to him, so congrats to him that he can enjoy the fruits of his labor as well as give back to the community.
osoti 11y ago
Body Parts Humans have that are Now Useless http://goo.gl/qahHUj http://goo.gl/qahHUj
ttandon 11y ago
My dad went to college with Amit in India - he and his friends always speak incredibly well of him but simultaneously express wonderment as to how it was he who made the rise, given that many others were more 'brilliant', class-toppers, etc. so to speak. I think it's amazingly interesting how true brilliance manifests itself in different ways than we could expect a conventional system to indicate.
- ignoramous 11y ago
  There are many factors at play, primary being seizing the opportunity in addition to being at the right place at the right time. Can't teach that.
- Chinjut 11y ago
  A testament to the perhaps under-appreciated role of luck in our life outcomes; those with the most success are not necessarily destined to it by intrinsic greatness, but just by capricious random events swinging their way as opposed to others'.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    There's a lot to be said for preparing and positioning yourself to be ready to take advantage of providence when its winds blow your way. I.e. it'll never happen for you if you're home watching TV. It's also necessary to be able to recognize opportunities when they come your way. I know I've missed many. My dad would say that most people don't recognize opportunities because they come disguised as hard work.
    - NumberCruncher 11y ago
      > most people don't recognize opportunities because they come disguised as hard work true words
    - foobarge 11y ago
      "Fortune favors the prepared mind." - derived as to still be relevant (I personally think) from Pasteur's "In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind."
plesner 11y ago
Here's a video of him leading a search quality meeting in 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtRJXnXgE-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtRJXnXgE-A.
- robbiet480 11y ago
  That was a great video, thanks for sharing! I wish Google would have continued putting out these videos, it's somewhat rare to see a technical discussion outside of a conference/talk setting.
- statictype 11y ago
  That was a great video. Are there any more like these?
babadigital 11y ago
Amazing engineer, who played a big role in Google search algorithms..
apsec112 11y ago
I'm surprised the media is billing this as "a push for AI". I was on both Giannandrea's and Singhal's teams at Google (I left last year). Giannandrea doesn't really have an AI or machine learning background (LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johngiannandrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/johngiannandrea). He was put in charge of machine learning relatively recently, IIRC less than two years ago. Before that he was doing Knowledge Graph - he came into Google through the Metaweb acquisition - and that technology stack really doesn't have much AI or ML in it. Google has tons of good AI people; if it wanted to, it could easily have replaced Singhal with any number of engineers with more AI experience.
- codeshaman 11y ago
  Maybe the depth of knowledge in the AI field wasn't the only reason why he was chosen ?
  - apsec112 11y ago
    Sure. But in that case, why interpret choosing him as "a push for AI"? The logic of "Google put an AI person in charge" -> "Google wants to focus the company more on AI" seems mostly valid, but the premise is false, so there's no reason to believe the conclusion (more than we would have otherwise).
    - dboreham 11y ago
      It is just spin (so is almost everything you read in the press, fwiw) and as such represents PR people doing their job well. You only realize the spinness when you have inside information that contradicts it. Congratulations to jg regardless. He's very smart and I'm sure has picked up enough understanding of current AI techniques in the past couple of years. Disclosure: I've known him for 30 years or so..
    - ovi256 11y ago
      That part, I'm ready to bet dollars to peanuts, is a talking point pushed by Google PR, which the journalist used (just like the other 99 facts and not-so-facts served to him on a platter all ready to digest by PR) because he's on a deadline and doesn't have the time to look for alternative explanations. That's a lot of work for a very weak ROI.
lacker 11y ago
I worked in Amit's organization for over four years and it was great. He was brilliant technically both in terms of writing the main search algorithm that replaced Sergey's janky code, and explaining tricky principles of designing search engines to other people as the search team massively grew. One conversation we had about when it made sense to take the square root of things, which I still recall which whiteboard it was on, in my noob-cubicle in building 43, was really the time when I realized, aha I get how to design search algorithms now. It was also always just a very fun, idealistic, and interesting team. And he was good at corporate politics and defended his minions well ;-) Oh also Amit clued me into the fact that Ardbeg is the best scotch. This is certainly a loss for Google, but the guy was there for 16 years, so it's probably just time for a change. I will cross my fingers hoping something cool comes next....
- boomzilla 11y ago
  Square root of relevance signals to "smooth" them out? I worked a bit on tuning search results, not at Google scale though and it's long time ago, but taking square root, or even logarithm of out of scale signals is a very common trick. Heck, even with the classic tf-idf signal, there are a bunch of heuristics like capping off tf, taking log of idf, penalizing doc length, etc. It's really a trial and error thing.
  - lacker 11y ago
    Yeah exactly - both that square roots are good for smoothing but more so that a it's trial and error thing. When I started out after dropping out of grad school I was working on search algorithms and a bunch of my coworkers had a background in informational retrieval and I did not, and I was kind of thinking about it in the wrong way. I was thinking about it like it was a math puzzle and if I just thought really hard it would all make sense. So one day I was stumped in how to make this signal useful and Amit suggested, hey why don't you take the square root. I was like, why a square root, it doesn't make much sense, nothing is getting squared ever, and he went up to the whiteboard and just drew a square-root-ish-wiggle-arc-shape and said look you just want something that looks like this. Square root, log, whatever. I was like, oh... am I allowed to write code that doesn't make any sense? I thought I wasn't supposed to do that. And he was just like, well, just don't worry about it, you are overthinking it, you can take all the square roots you want, multiply by 2 if it helps, add 5, whatever, just make things work and we can make it make sense later. At that point I realized that real world software engineering was much different than research had been, and also that this was going to be way more fun.
garyclarke27 11y ago
Hope the new guy reveses the recent change to presentation of Google results on iPad. The so called - Mobile Friendly - is truly horrible - it's such a pain having to - request desktop site - for every single search, shaame there is no auto option for this on safari or even better change user agent in settings. Some app browsers let you do this, but they are slower and flackier than safari. I tried Bing because of this, but still no where near in relevance of results for me.
doozler 11y ago
How does one become so great and intelligent?
- zeroxfe 11y ago
  It's a secret known only to a select few. I'm in a charitable mood today, and for only $99, I'll let you in on it. (But do it quickly, for I might not feel as charitable tomorrow.)
- facepalm 11y ago
  Go to Netflix and make a list of your favorite TV shows. Then every evening, instead of watching two episodes from your favorite shows, read papers and implement stuff.
tyingq 11y ago
Combined with Matt Cutt's "indefinite leave", this seems somewhat curious. Pure speculation, but it's somewhat interesting to me that both are the "old guard" in search, and during their tenure, the pure AI sort of approaches, like Panda and Penguin, were implemented outside of the main algorithm, as bolt-ons that were very klunky and separate. Feels like a move to to clear the way for AI to drive the algorithm, versus running outboard and afterwards as a tweak/tune cycle. Edit: Er, okay. It's not curious that an < 50 years of age superstar is suddenly retiring for personal reasons?
- yeukhon 11y ago
  > Feels like a move to to clear the way for AI to drive the algorithm, versus running outboard and afterwards as a tweak/tune cycle. Well, to be honest, you still have to tweak and tune your AI model so that it works. Data speaks for itself. You have to run experiments, so the approach they have is going to be the same ANYWAY. AI isn't magical. It may just happen that both sides feel it is time for someone to take a new position. I think that's the better way to put it. But why this new guy not other seniors on the same team? That's a good question.
  - tyingq 11y ago
    The tweak tune that I referenced as klunky wasn't the AI per se, but the way Google integrates it into the search results. Awkward enough that they would go more than a year between running/integrating it, and when it was deployed, the search results would swing wildy for weeks.

284 points by sonabinu 11y ago

As discussed in Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo![0], Mayer's feud with Singhal was responsible for her 'demotion' to Google's Maps/local team, and eventual departure for Yahoo!: > Singhal loathed how, when his team was ready to roll out a change, Mayer would insist it pass through her UI review—a process that could take weeks. … > [I]n 2010, Larry Page decided that Google was moving too slowly. He wanted the whole company to move as fast as its Android and Chrome divisions. > One impetus for this decision was a memo from a longtime Googler named Urs Hölzle. It reminded everyone that social networks, and Facebook in particular, had become a dominant force on the Internet. It said that Google was nearly blind to all the knowledge stored on Facebook. Hölzle pleaded with his colleagues to focus on social media, or else the company could be swept away in an oncoming wave. > Page took the memo to heart, and put Vic Gundotra in charge of developing a social network for Google. The project was code-named Emerald Sea, after a Japanese painting in which a boat is about to be wiped out by a huge wave. Gundotra’s team built a prototype in a hundred days. > The speed impressed Page. He realized that one thing Android, Chrome, and the Emerald Sea project had in common was that each had a single person in charge. He wondered if it was time to put one person in charge of search. > Gundotra, suddenly vested with influence thanks to the Emerald Sea project, made it known that he did not like working with Mayer. With all her reviews and processes, she slowed things down too much. > Page thought about the future of Google and its past. To him, the strength of the company was that it developed machines that could learn what humans wanted and then provide it to them. He believed that Singhal better understood how to make the technology that powered those machines. Page believed that made Singhal more capable of pushing Google products to their technological limits…He summoned Mayer into a one-on-one meeting and told her she was done working on Google search. 0: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LLIJ22W http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LLIJ22W

wavefunction 11y ago
>knowledge stored on Facebook A questionable assertion.
- awa 11y ago
  All of my local recommendations (handyman, local photographer, where to buy tomatoes) have now shifted to facebook groups. I no longer google handyman in blah, xyz. instead I go through my saved posts in FB. This is along with local city news and news from friends and family that is all on facebook. e.g. One of my colleague's (and friend) kid was in ER last weekend so on Monday during standup I was able to tell the rest of the folks that he was out due to family emergency without getting an email from him...
  - kumarm 11y ago
    [All of my local recommendations (handyman, local photographer, where to buy tomatoes) have now shifted to facebook groups. I no longer google handyman in blah, xyz. instead I go through my saved posts in FB.] In my local area NextDoor is replacing FB completely for any local recommendations, news, Alerts.
- mwfunk 11y ago
  Not questionable at all- it's a gold mine for knowledge of value to advertisers. Every post, like, etc. on Facebook is spontaneously coming from a user. You don't have to infer what people love or hate based on browser and search history, you just let them tell you (and all their friends) what they love or hate. They're literally telling you what you should advertise to them, it doesn't get better than that for businesses driven by ad revenue (not a negative judgement, just an observation). Of course Google would want that data, and of course Facebook would want to prevent them from getting it.
  - zaphar 11y ago
    The caveat being that on the level of the user it's more like (love, sort of like, guilted into saying you liked) vs (hate, feel kind of meh about, guilted into saying your hated). The aggregation of those likes is more useful but at the individual user level it's a terrible signal. Especially since the entire social structure of the network is geared toward getting you to click like whether you actually like it or now.
jacobolus 11y ago
I don’t know if it has anything to do with Mayer/lack of review per se, or if it’s more about the scattered focus of G+, Android, etc., or if companies of a certain size are just inevitably incapable of solid UI implementation, or what, but Google’s UI polish on its flagship browser apps has taken a nosedive in the past 5–6 years. They used to be lightweight, fast, and reliable. Now they are bloated monstrosities packed with weird glitches that devour browser resources.
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  I think Mayer's direct focus was more on UI than on performance, although a simple UI could certainly lead to better performance: > One time, an APM brought a product to [Mayer] for review and she told him, “This page is too busy. What you need to do is look at every font on the page, every font size. And every time you see a new color or a new font size, you add up a point. I want this page below five points.” > The comment about “five points” ended up in the meeting notes, and then it became a rule. No pages with more than five points. > Another rule was: Design a product for the “98 percent use” case. For Mayer, the best example of a product that followed this rule was the Xerox copy machine. It could do all kinds of fancy things: staple, collate, copy, and fax. But if you walked up to one and pressed the giant green button, the right thing just happened. Mayer believed on every good product there should be a big button like that for the 98 percent use case, where if the user clicks it or taps it, they get a delightful, fluid, simple experience. > During a product review, Mayer would count the number of keystrokes it took to get every job done. Too many, and it was back to work.
  - jmknoll 11y ago
    These are great product guidelines. Especially the 98% use case. Are these from the book linked in the parent comment? Or do you have a source with more ideas along these lines?
    - w1ntermute 11y ago
      Yes, it's from the same book.
magicalist 11y ago
I don't see how that quote indicates that her "feud with Singhal was responsible for her 'demotion'...and eventual departure". I'll admit that I generally dislike these books that construct a simple narrative out of anecdotes out of years of time, so I'm mostly responding because it's disappointing that this is the only top comment right now. And (assuming it's true), believe it or not he's not the first person to resent someone bringing their expertise to bear on their baby, regardless of merit.
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  To continue: > In October 2010, it was made official. Mayer was removed from the top of Google’s search organization and put in charge of Google Maps and other “local” products. > Technically, this was a lateral move, if not a promotion, because Mayer retained her vice-president title and she was, at the same time, given a seat on Google’s operating committee—then-CEO Eric Schmidt’s round table of top executives from the company. > In reality, it was a demotion. Mayer was no longer in charge of what Google’s most important product looked like or how it worked. At Google, there was search, which generates nearly all of the company’s revenues and profits, and then there was everything else. Running Google search, Mayer was managing the most important product at the world’s most important Internet company. Running Google Maps, she was not.
  - magicalist 11y ago
    At best are you trying to argue for a "feud" with Larry Page?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - w1ntermute 11y ago
      > Page consulted with [SVP of Engineering Bill] Coughran. Coughran said he could no longer peacefully referee what was becoming an increasingly hostile relationship between Singhal and Mayer. Coughran said that a couple times a week, one or the other would be in his office, complaining and asking to lead the organization. > “We’re going to have to pick somebody here,” he told Page. The feud was with Singhal. Page only picked the winner. I'd recommend you just read the book (the quotes are from chapter 6).
nostrademons 11y ago
It's interesting to see printed descriptions of events that I lived through. (I worked on projects sponsored by both of them, and was also loaned out to help with the Emerald Sea launch.) Some are echoes of the truth, but there are also some fairly big inaccuracies. Emerald Sea didn't have anything close to a prototype that could ship in 100 days. At best, there were a few technology demos from individual engineers. Urs sent his memo in March 2010; Emerald Sea launched as Google+ in June 2011, with the +1 button (done by David Byttow, who later attained infamy as the founder of Secret) launching a couple months earlier. Vic had few if any dealings with Marissa. She was moved to Geo in Oct 2010; at the time, Emerald Sea was a few scattered tech demos. The push to integrate G+ into everything Google didn't really start until after G+ launched in June 2011. Larry was impressed by speed, but I think that his exemplars were much more Android and Chrome than Emerald Sea. Mayer and Singhal had a very confused reporting relationship - basically, the engineers reported up to Singhal and the PMs reported up to Mayer. I wasn't close enough to them to know how well they got along personally, only that they both had very strong opinions and a lot of experience to back them up. It did make for some very slow product decisions as PMs had to get both of them to sign off on a change.

boomzilla 11y ago

Ok, wild guess here but Sundar is cleaning out the house? It's kind of hard to give direction to some who's been there forever, actually achieved more technologically and financially, and more critically would not listen to you. No wonder Larry decided to create Alphabet, stayed out of all the office politics. I would take a bet that Jeff Dean and Urs Holzle will leave in the next year or two.

boulos 11y ago
I'll take that bet. What are your terms? They must both leave by Feb 3, 2018 (and I would not count some sort of alphabet-like spin out as "leaving").
- eitally 11y ago
  Heh, me too. He says that so nonchalantly it's obvious he has no personal experience with any of them.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

hackaflocka 11y ago

Does anyone know why the Google search results page had 2 copies of the top navbar for a while? One with a ghastly black background? Was that Marissa or Singhal?

danblick 11y ago
Seriously? You don't get to be a senior vice president by picking background colors.
- geodel 11y ago
  Though you can be CEO by redesigning a logo :-)

pfarnsworth 11y ago

Google owes a great deal of our success to him, so congrats to him that he can enjoy the fruits of his labor as well as give back to the community.

osoti 11y ago

Body Parts Humans have that are Now Useless http://goo.gl/qahHUj http://goo.gl/qahHUj

ttandon 11y ago

My dad went to college with Amit in India - he and his friends always speak incredibly well of him but simultaneously express wonderment as to how it was he who made the rise, given that many others were more 'brilliant', class-toppers, etc. so to speak. I think it's amazingly interesting how true brilliance manifests itself in different ways than we could expect a conventional system to indicate.

ignoramous 11y ago
There are many factors at play, primary being seizing the opportunity in addition to being at the right place at the right time. Can't teach that.
Chinjut 11y ago
A testament to the perhaps under-appreciated role of luck in our life outcomes; those with the most success are not necessarily destined to it by intrinsic greatness, but just by capricious random events swinging their way as opposed to others'.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  There's a lot to be said for preparing and positioning yourself to be ready to take advantage of providence when its winds blow your way. I.e. it'll never happen for you if you're home watching TV. It's also necessary to be able to recognize opportunities when they come your way. I know I've missed many. My dad would say that most people don't recognize opportunities because they come disguised as hard work.
  - NumberCruncher 11y ago
    > most people don't recognize opportunities because they come disguised as hard work true words
  - foobarge 11y ago
    "Fortune favors the prepared mind." - derived as to still be relevant (I personally think) from Pasteur's "In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind."

plesner 11y ago

Here's a video of him leading a search quality meeting in 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtRJXnXgE-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtRJXnXgE-A.

robbiet480 11y ago
That was a great video, thanks for sharing! I wish Google would have continued putting out these videos, it's somewhat rare to see a technical discussion outside of a conference/talk setting.
statictype 11y ago
That was a great video. Are there any more like these?

babadigital 11y ago

Amazing engineer, who played a big role in Google search algorithms..

apsec112 11y ago

I'm surprised the media is billing this as "a push for AI". I was on both Giannandrea's and Singhal's teams at Google (I left last year). Giannandrea doesn't really have an AI or machine learning background (LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johngiannandrea https://www.linkedin.com/in/johngiannandrea). He was put in charge of machine learning relatively recently, IIRC less than two years ago. Before that he was doing Knowledge Graph - he came into Google through the Metaweb acquisition - and that technology stack really doesn't have much AI or ML in it. Google has tons of good AI people; if it wanted to, it could easily have replaced Singhal with any number of engineers with more AI experience.

codeshaman 11y ago
Maybe the depth of knowledge in the AI field wasn't the only reason why he was chosen ?
- apsec112 11y ago
  Sure. But in that case, why interpret choosing him as "a push for AI"? The logic of "Google put an AI person in charge" -> "Google wants to focus the company more on AI" seems mostly valid, but the premise is false, so there's no reason to believe the conclusion (more than we would have otherwise).
  - dboreham 11y ago
    It is just spin (so is almost everything you read in the press, fwiw) and as such represents PR people doing their job well. You only realize the spinness when you have inside information that contradicts it. Congratulations to jg regardless. He's very smart and I'm sure has picked up enough understanding of current AI techniques in the past couple of years. Disclosure: I've known him for 30 years or so..
  - ovi256 11y ago
    That part, I'm ready to bet dollars to peanuts, is a talking point pushed by Google PR, which the journalist used (just like the other 99 facts and not-so-facts served to him on a platter all ready to digest by PR) because he's on a deadline and doesn't have the time to look for alternative explanations. That's a lot of work for a very weak ROI.

lacker 11y ago

I worked in Amit's organization for over four years and it was great. He was brilliant technically both in terms of writing the main search algorithm that replaced Sergey's janky code, and explaining tricky principles of designing search engines to other people as the search team massively grew. One conversation we had about when it made sense to take the square root of things, which I still recall which whiteboard it was on, in my noob-cubicle in building 43, was really the time when I realized, aha I get how to design search algorithms now. It was also always just a very fun, idealistic, and interesting team. And he was good at corporate politics and defended his minions well ;-) Oh also Amit clued me into the fact that Ardbeg is the best scotch. This is certainly a loss for Google, but the guy was there for 16 years, so it's probably just time for a change. I will cross my fingers hoping something cool comes next....

boomzilla 11y ago
Square root of relevance signals to "smooth" them out? I worked a bit on tuning search results, not at Google scale though and it's long time ago, but taking square root, or even logarithm of out of scale signals is a very common trick. Heck, even with the classic tf-idf signal, there are a bunch of heuristics like capping off tf, taking log of idf, penalizing doc length, etc. It's really a trial and error thing.
- lacker 11y ago
  Yeah exactly - both that square roots are good for smoothing but more so that a it's trial and error thing. When I started out after dropping out of grad school I was working on search algorithms and a bunch of my coworkers had a background in informational retrieval and I did not, and I was kind of thinking about it in the wrong way. I was thinking about it like it was a math puzzle and if I just thought really hard it would all make sense. So one day I was stumped in how to make this signal useful and Amit suggested, hey why don't you take the square root. I was like, why a square root, it doesn't make much sense, nothing is getting squared ever, and he went up to the whiteboard and just drew a square-root-ish-wiggle-arc-shape and said look you just want something that looks like this. Square root, log, whatever. I was like, oh... am I allowed to write code that doesn't make any sense? I thought I wasn't supposed to do that. And he was just like, well, just don't worry about it, you are overthinking it, you can take all the square roots you want, multiply by 2 if it helps, add 5, whatever, just make things work and we can make it make sense later. At that point I realized that real world software engineering was much different than research had been, and also that this was going to be way more fun.

garyclarke27 11y ago

Hope the new guy reveses the recent change to presentation of Google results on iPad. The so called - Mobile Friendly - is truly horrible - it's such a pain having to - request desktop site - for every single search, shaame there is no auto option for this on safari or even better change user agent in settings. Some app browsers let you do this, but they are slower and flackier than safari. I tried Bing because of this, but still no where near in relevance of results for me.

doozler 11y ago

How does one become so great and intelligent?

zeroxfe 11y ago
It's a secret known only to a select few. I'm in a charitable mood today, and for only $99, I'll let you in on it. (But do it quickly, for I might not feel as charitable tomorrow.)
facepalm 11y ago
Go to Netflix and make a list of your favorite TV shows. Then every evening, instead of watching two episodes from your favorite shows, read papers and implement stuff.

tyingq 11y ago

Combined with Matt Cutt's "indefinite leave", this seems somewhat curious. Pure speculation, but it's somewhat interesting to me that both are the "old guard" in search, and during their tenure, the pure AI sort of approaches, like Panda and Penguin, were implemented outside of the main algorithm, as bolt-ons that were very klunky and separate. Feels like a move to to clear the way for AI to drive the algorithm, versus running outboard and afterwards as a tweak/tune cycle. Edit: Er, okay. It's not curious that an < 50 years of age superstar is suddenly retiring for personal reasons?

yeukhon 11y ago
> Feels like a move to to clear the way for AI to drive the algorithm, versus running outboard and afterwards as a tweak/tune cycle. Well, to be honest, you still have to tweak and tune your AI model so that it works. Data speaks for itself. You have to run experiments, so the approach they have is going to be the same ANYWAY. AI isn't magical. It may just happen that both sides feel it is time for someone to take a new position. I think that's the better way to put it. But why this new guy not other seniors on the same team? That's a good question.
- tyingq 11y ago
  The tweak tune that I referenced as klunky wasn't the AI per se, but the way Google integrates it into the search results. Awkward enough that they would go more than a year between running/integrating it, and when it was deployed, the search results would swing wildy for weeks.