Posts About ‘Amit Singhal’

Exclusive Interview Amit Singhal: “People often confuse context with personalization”

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For some Larry Page or Sergey Brin might be the big mind when it comes to Google. Others believe its Matt Cutts who holds all the knowledge. But ask any Googler who has the most influence on what actually happens with the search engine Google and most probably 99% of them will answer: Amit Singhal.

Amit Singhal is the Senior VP at Google, a “Google Fellow”, and the head of Google’s core ranking team. There are not many issues with Google Search which do not go past him. Amit Singhal and his team are responsible for the Google search algorithms. The video from the Search Quality Meeting which we showed before and is also placed at the end of this post shows just that: it is Singhal who makes the decisions and it is Singhal who knows the most. Anyone who looks at leaderships will also notice that the way Singhal leads the meeting is like a natural leader.

In a few weeks time Singhal will make a rare appearance on the stage of a major search conference. And even rarer: that appearance will not be in the US, but in Europe: at SMX London 2012. We talked to Danny Sullivan about that show earlier and now we have the exclusive chance to talk to Amit Singhal who was kind enough to answer some of our burning questions. We tried to ask him questions on different topics: Search Plus Your World, the Panda Update, Google and Europe and some of the privacy issues Google is running into. Enjoy! (more…)

Google Shows Us The Search Quality Meeting

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One of the most named points of criticism towards Google is their openness. In the past when you had a Googler at an event you were sure he or she was not going to say a word more than necessary.

In the past year or so this has changed. Google is much more focussed on openness. It might be triggered by the infringements they have gotten where especially the US government has complained about Google being to ‘vague’ or it might have been triggered by the fact that Google for many has become the ‘big and dangerous’ company and they want their brand image to go back to the ‘tech boys’ it was before.

Fact is they are a lot more open, or at least they seem to be. On conferences Googlers seem more open, Google is now giving us monthly updates on their changes, and this week they post a video of their Search Quality Meeting. An 8 minute video showing us the meeting it is all about, or as Amit Singhal says: “This meeting is the heart of what we do, what we approve, how we run search.” (more…)

Amit Singhal: “The idea is to make search more intuitive”

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One of the ‘big names’ at Google at the moment is Amit Singhal. Singhal, who will be keynote at SMX London in a few months, is SVP of Search and has a big influence on where Google is heading.

Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang spoke with Amit Singhal about the future of search. An interesting talk which you can see below. He talked about mobile, how search should evolve and he also addressed some of the criticism which has been out lately concerning privacy issues and new products like SPYW. (more…)

Amit Singhal to Keynote SMX London 2012, Danny Sullivan Returns

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Next week we first will be looking at SES London 2012 but already other events are preparing for their turn this year. So is SMX London 2012 which will take place 15/16 May 2012 at Chelsea Football Club in London.

The Chelsea Football club is known for having celebrities walking around the grounds and that will be no different in May. Only this time it will not be Football Celebrities but Search Celebrities. SMX has announced that for the first time since he moved back to the US Danny Sullivan will be actively involved in SMX London and the keynote speaker will be a Google celebrity: Google Fellow and the Head of Google’s Core Ranking Team Amit Singhal. (more…)

Amit Singhal To Join Matt Cutts At Pubcon Keynote

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In a few weeks time it is Vegas time: Pubcon Las Vegas opens its doors. It always is a reason for many to head to Vegas and have loads of fun. This time they just might have to get out of bed early twice. With Leo Laporte keynoting on day one it was already a good start. And when Matt Cutts shows up at 9am on the Wednesday, you might be tempted to be there too.

And if his colleague Amit Singhal decides to join Cutts on stage you know that if you are interested in the search scene you know you probably will be getting up early. Amit Singhal, one of the ‘cool kids’ at Google as they say themselves, will be featured in a keynote address including a question and answer session. (more…)

Google’s ‘Cool Kids’ Matt Cutts, Ben Gomes, and Amit Singhal Talk in Public

During my holiday I was reading the book “In the Plex” by Steven Levy. You really feel you are getting an inside into the Google offices when you read that book (I will review it later). In the book Levy mentiones the office of Matt Cutts, Ben Gomes, and Amit Singhal as being an office which by Googlers is called the “cool kids’ office”. Now to be honest, if you would tell that to somebody outside of the industry and show that person a picture of the three, they probably wouldn’t believe it. But online, Search and Google in particular is a world of its own. Here the ‘cool kids’ are those who know the most.

The Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley business and technology forum, got the three to talk their stuff not in the offices at Google, but on stage. Moderated by Danny Sullivan they talked for almost 1,5 hours about a lot of ‘cool’ stuff. If you have the time, you should really watch this.

Did Google’s algorithm change misfire? Mahalo fires 10% of staff

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There have been written many stories about Google’s most recent algorithm update. The update, which was named “Farmer update” by Searchengineland was supposedly aimed at content farms, websites which deliver low quality content based on ‘copied’ pages.

Many sites in the US were ‘hit’ by this update. It was supposedly cleaning up the SERPS, but it seems as if Google has been cleaning up a little bit too much in some cases. An article in Wired shows that there are many sites which feel that they deliver quality content did get hit by Google big time, maybe even unfairly. (more…)