Amit Singhal, Google’s SVP for search, is leaving the company after fifteen years. Singhal has long been in charge of Google's flagship product, and he famously rewrote Google's page ranking algorithm in 2001. He was also a big driver of Google's Star Trek ambitions.
With Singhal leaving, John Giannandrea, Google's head of artificial intelligence, is taking over the search division. Re/code is reporting that with the change, Google will merge the search and artificial intelligence divisions. Giannandrea previously led the effort to introduce the Knowledge Graph—a machine learning that gives you a direct answer rather than a list of links—to search. Today the Knowledge Graph powers answers to the "OK Google" voice queries that appear on just about every consumer-facing Google OS.
Moving the artificial intelligence unit in with search is certainly an eyebrow-raising move. Machine Learning seems to be taking over all of Google lately. Google Deepmind is building a general artificial intelligence that is smart enough to learn and beat various games. It recently open sourced TensorFlow, a software library for machine intelligence, and machine learning technology in Google Inbox can even write short replies to e-mails for you.
After building up Google's biggest product, Singhal says, "I am eager to see what kind of impact I can make philanthropically, and of course, to spend more time with my family."
