Why Google can’t perfect search engine Google’s search chief Amit Singhal tells Emma Barnett that social media players Facebook and Twitter are preventing him from doing so

Why Google can’t perfect search engine

Google’s search chief Amit Singhal tells Emma Barnett that social media players Facebook and Twitter are preventing him from doing so

Google search got a bit cleverer this week. In what has been described as a ‘quantum leap’ for the biggest search engine in the world, now processing 100 billion queries a month, Google has extended its Knowledge Graph to Britain and made it possible for people search their Gmail messages from the Google.com search box. The Knowledge Graph is a database of over 500 million real-world people, places and things which Google uses to try to provide answers to users’ questions. For instance, if someone searches for ‘Notting Hill’, information about both the film and the area of London would appear in a box on the right hand side of the page, alongside the traditional search results. Amit Singhal (pictured), Google’s search chief, says both of this change, and the new secure and private line allowing people to privately access their Gmail via the main Google.com search box, are steps towards the holy grail: pre-emptive search. That is, a search engine that knows what you want before you even ask. Singhal joined Google in 2000 and rewrote the algorithm powering the search engine, which had originally been created by Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder. His title now is ‘Google Fellow’ but internally he’s known as ‘the Jedi’. When I interviewed him last summer, Singhal said: “Search needs to be far more communicative. You need to be able to have a conversation with your search engine. I want my search engine to be the expert who knows me the best. It needs to know you so well that sometimes you don’t need to ask it the next question.” But Singhal is still frustrated by the data that Google cannot access. Google cannot ever achieve a search engine which crawls all of this data while Facebook and Twitter exist and refuse to open their networks –something Singhal abhors. When we speak - me in Google’s plush new London offices and Singhal in the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters - the company’s internal version of Skype and then instant video messenger both fail on us several times before we resort to the good old telephone. “We believe that the entire universe of people’s information should be indexed through search… this includes both public information and at the same time your personal information – such as a shipment confirmation in your Gmail and then there is the social information which people have shared with their friends and family,” he tells me. “The question about other social networks is a very important one. We believe that this is users’ data and yet we have to make a deal with third party social network, such as Facebook, to actually give access back to the users – because clearly we cannot crawl these social networks. “In this day and age when users have created the data on these third party social networks – but they don’t fully control where they can index and search their data – we need to debate this. “Indeed as things stand – these companies who are running these closed platforms do allow or disallow other companies to provide services on their data. Users need to decide.” Singhal makes a compelling case about the benefits of an internet without these walled gardens. Google search would not have been possible without an open web. But Google is a business not a social enterprise, a fact that cannot be ignored despite the sensible and seemingly well-intentioned logic underpinning Singhal’s frustration with Facebook and Twitter. And yet, Google, the search giant’s own social network, is a walled garden that does not allow its users seamlessly feed their status updates through to rivals Facebook or Twitter. Google is currently fighting regulators over user privacy breaches and accusations of biased search results. On Friday, it was confirmed that Google will pay $22.5 million to the US Federal Trade Commission to settle charges that it bypassed the privacy settings of people using Apple’s Safari browser. Indeed Twitter, Facebook and Myspace teamed up earlier this year to publicly criticise Google over changes to its search engine which promoted Google content not long after the social network launched. Singhal, refuses to let anything slip about any current negotiations with Facebook and Twitter but when pressed, admits that search results relating to Google “have now settled in a place which were better than when we launched”. In defence of Google’s prioritisation of Google content in search results, Singhal says: “I think it’s a learning process – even for us. We experiment, we learn, we improve – that’s what Google does.” Google is currently trying to negotiate another financial settlement with European regulators having been subject to a wide-ranging antitrust investigation over accusations it manipulated search results to favour its own products. As an engineer, Singhal does not comment on ongoing legal matters. Singhal’s vision of search is a brilliant one. But sadly it is sometimes hindered by the business side of Google, which is intent upon dominating the web, even if it has to, on occasion, sacrifice users’ privacy and freedom of choice in its quest to do so. Daily Telegraph