Ben Gomes, the India-trend techie who overseas Google’s
handling of 100 searches a month, believes a new voice-based interface is
needed for the next frontier of search centered round mobile phones and tablet
computers.
“Now search is becoming mobile-on phones and tablets. The
challenge is that it is on a small screen, so it’s hard to type. The
opportunity is that it’s got a really good microphone and touch screen,” he
said.
“It can enable a new kind of interface. So we realized we
want to build and interface that can much like the way you talk to some person
and ask a question,” Gomes said.
And while the Google search app can already respond to
questions using voice-based software, Gomes told the BBC that the process is “going
to be got more better and intelligent”.
The Tanzania-born, India-bred, US-educated vice-president of
search is responsible for helping to answer queries in the shortest time
possible on desktops, tablets and phones.
Search is Google’s cash cow, bringing in a majority o f its
USD 50 billion revenues last year. It is also, said Gomes, “about having a
continuous conversation with the user to find out what he wants”.
Described by a BBC as a “boy-like 45-years-old guru of
search in Googleplex”, the company headquarters in Mountain View, California, Gomes
works out of an untidy cubicle with four other top engineers.
Gomes and his team work on “their fine-tooth comb search of
the worldwide web to serve up the popular search engine”. He said: “When I joined
Google in 1999, search was about basically finding the words you search for in
a document. Then we took this view that we were going to understand what you want
and give you what you need.
Trawling through over 20 million web pages a day, Gomes and
his “army of search” – a substantial number of Google’s 44,000 employees – use algorithms
to make search intuitive, multimedia and super smart. Gomes is especially proud
of knowledge Graph, a new function launched last year to make the site’s
algorithm “act more human” in a attempt to offer instant answers to search
questions.
“It’s a database of all things in the world. It pulls
together different databases and unifies them into a single coherent one that
has about 500 to 600 million people, places and things in them and about 18
billion attributes and connections between those things,” he said.
Google handles 100-billio plus searches every month, or over
three billion a day. A good 15 percent of the searches questions every day are now.
When Gomes joined Google in 1999 after a stint in Sun Microsystems working on a
Java programming language, some searches could take up to 20 seconds. Today a
search for Ben Gomes on Google shows about 19,000,000 results in 28 seconds.
Gomes, the son of car distributor father and a school
teacher mother, moved to the US 25 years ago. He went to Berkeley, where he
received a PhD in computer science.
