
Amit Singhal, an Influential Engineer at Google, Will Retire - sonabinu
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/technology/amit-singhal-an-influential-engineer-at-google-will-retire.html
======
lacker
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
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
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.

~~~
jventura
When I started working in Information Retrieval this was something that I
enjoyed right away. It was quite easy to come up with a metric that could give
more value to some things instead of others..

A few years later I did a PhD in Information Retrieval doing the same kind of
things, like it was an art and always exploring new metrics and ideas. I do
miss those days, but it is hard to find remote work in this area (IR/NLP)..

~~~
yeukhon
I keep seeing Information Retrieval. How is it different from general search
algorithm and are there grad programs famous for search? The only thing comes
to mind is private information retrieval in security.

------
w1ntermute
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)

~~~
jacobolus
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
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.

~~~
eitland
Another rule was: Design a product for the “98 percent use” case. [...] 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.

This is all good, but hereis the thing that many designers with great
responsibilty doesn't seem to get: As much as there is one big button/search
field etc, DON'T REMOVE advanced options for advanced users. Example: For a
long time Google Maps on Android it would be impossible to look up a route
from anywhere but where you were now. It was not only streamlined to start
with current location but rather neutered so you couldn't. To add insult to
injury it used to work fine before someone started their UX work :-/

~~~
_pmf_
> For a long time Google Maps on Android it would be impossible to look up a
> route from anywhere but where you were now. It was not only streamlined to
> start with current location but rather neutered so you couldn't.

I almost lost my mind trying to do this exact thing.

~~~
Super_Jambo
Google maps refusal to make offline reasonable has pretty much killed my use
of it. You can use OSM data pre-download the whole set of countries you're
driving through and not worry about poor signal / roaming charges / data use.

Or you can use Google maps and get screwed. Guess it works better if you're in
the US.

~~~
dgacmu
Does offline not work where you are?
[https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/6291838?hl=en](https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/6291838?hl=en)

------
ttandon
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.

~~~
Chinjut
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'.

~~~
cobookman
A very wealthy man once told me the phrase, "There is no such thing as luck.
'Luck' is where preparation meets opportunity."

I'm sure he had some random events placed in front of him, giving him an
unique opportunity. But he executed phenomenally. And we should not discount
that. Many have had the same kinds of opportunities and failed to execute.

~~~
colmvp
That said, I'm always surprised by how people are so quick to discount luck.
Or consider a bad thing if they got lucky.

You can be both prepared and have an opportunity and still fail because of
factors outside of your control. Likewise, you could be unprepared, flail your
way through a solution, and still manage to be very successful at the very end
because the stars aligned. Maybe the market was super ripe, your competitors
were going through some rough patches, etc.

Success stories are often carefully crafted with a narrative fallacy. I can
think of several very successful companies today that would've been sold a
long time ago had it not been for the potential buyer rejecting the deal. Or
entrepreneurs who have one success, and then were never able to create a
majorly successful big startup after.

------
plesner
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
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.

------
boomzilla
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
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
Heh, me too. He says that so nonchalantly it's obvious he has no personal
experience with any of them.

------
apsec112
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.

~~~
Sven7
Google's problem in search has never been a lack of good engineering, its been
a lack of vision for search. The fact that someone from the search team isn't
leading the company says everything.

I think the IBM's Watson, Wolfram Alpha, Freebase etc were more much visionary
than what Google has done in search in the last 10 years. Even Bing's API's
are much more useful. The WolframAlpha and Watson kind of NLP queries have
been around for almost 6-7 years now. And Google still can't handle most of
them. Whats the use of having all the AI experts on the planet?

Search should be its own company split apart from Chrome and Android. The
empire defense game distracts from what Search can be,

~~~
eitally
I think this gets back to the aforementioned point about Marissa's statement
re: serving the 98%. Yes, WA & Watson are super useful, but they're useful in
ways a huge majority of the population will never miss and thus never know
about. Google has been far more focused on addressing the "obvious" problems
and low hanging fruit ... it's only a matter of time before they start
encroaching, imho.

------
tyingq
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
> 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
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.

------
pfarnsworth
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.

------
doozler
How does one become so great and intelligent?

~~~
facepalm
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.

------
hackaflocka
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
Seriously? You don't get to be a senior vice president by picking background
colors.

~~~
geodel
Though you can be CEO by redesigning a logo :-)

------
garyclarke27
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.

