Amitabh Kumar "Amit" Singhal (born September 1968) is a former senior vice president at Google Inc., having been a Google Fellow and the head of Google's Search team for 15 years.[5][6]
UMD was the turning point in my life. Studying Information Retrieval with Don Crouch and then Don recommending that I move to Cornell to study with Gerard Salton, is the main reason behind my success today. Don gave me the love for search, I have just followed my passion ever since.[9]
— Amit Singhal
Singhal continued his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and received a Ph.D. degree in 1996.[9] At Cornell, Singhal studied with Gerard Salton, a pioneer in the field of information retrieval, the academic discipline which forms the foundation of modern search. John Battelle, in his book The Search, calls Gerard Salton "the father of digital search." After getting a Ph.D. in 1996, Singhal joined AT&T Labs (previously a part of Bell Labs), where he continued his research in information retrieval, speech retrieval and other related fields.[9]
Controversy
He left Google on 26 February 2016, following sexual-harassment allegations.[10][11][12][13]
He later joined Uber as Senior Vice President of software engineering in 2017 but was asked to resign for failing to disclose the reason for his resignation from Google.[14][15][16] It was later revealed that Google paid him $35 Million as his exit package.[17][18]
Career
In 2000, he was recruited by friend Krishna Bharat to join Google.[9] Singhal ran Google's core search quality department where he and his team were responsible for the Google search algorithms. According to The New York Times, Singhal was the "master" of Google's ranking algorithm – the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user's question.[19] As a reward for his rewrite of the search engine in 2001, Singhal was named a "Google Fellow".[20] Singhal served as the head of Google's core search ranking team[5][6] until his retirement announced on 26 February 2016.[11]
In 2017, he joined Uber as SVP of engineering, reporting to CEO Travis Kalanick, and with his fellow Google alum Kevin Thompson operating as SVP of marketplace engineering.[21]
