amit singhal::These days, seems to be doing everything, everywhere amit singhal

amit singhal::These days, seems to be doing everything, everywhere.
But at its core, google remains a search engine.
And its search pages, blue hyperlinks set against a bland, white background, have made it the most visited, most profitable and arguably the most powerful company on the internet.
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.
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 and preserving the tidy advertising gold mine that search represents.
Online stores, he notes, find that a quarter to a half of their visitors, and most of their new customers, come from search engines.
These formulas have grown better at reading the minds of users to interpret a very short query.
Are the users looking for a job, a purchase or a fact?
They can even compensate for vaguely worded queries or outright mistakes.
Singhal, a 39yearold 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 searchquality team, observing some internal meetings and talking to several top engineers.
But the engineers still explained more than they ever have before in the news media about how their search system works.
As google constantly finetunes its search engine, one challenge it faces is sheer scale.
It is now the most popular web site in the world, offering its services in 112 languages, indexing tens of billons of web pages and handling hundreds of millions of queries a day.
Even more daunting, many of those pages are shams created by hucksters trying to lure web surfers to their sites filled with ads, pornography or financial scams.
At the same time, users have come to expect that google can sift through all that data and find what they are seeking, with just a few words as clues.