[congerous]

There's some baseless speculation in this thread about what's Singhal's departure meant for Google search. It's important to remember that Singhal was committed Google's knowledge graph, a painstaking, manually constructed graph of entities and relationships that surfaces the occasional answer (ask Google what the capital of Azerbaijan is and you will see a knowledge graph answer). Knowledge graphs are brittle, hard to extend, and hard to modify in the face of changing data. Google has tilted towards machine learning and neural nets for a lot of functions, and Singhal was not part of that tilt. But you could argue that machine learning and neural nets are producing better results, which counters the argument that Singhal leaving means that Google doesn't care about organic results any more. That's BS, frankly.

[rryan]

The person who replaced Amit as head of search (John Giannandrea) is the founder / CEO of Metaweb and creator of Freebase -- aka what became Google's Knowledge Graph. Google using more ML in search doesn't mean a KG isn't also useful for query understanding.

And KGs aren't mutually exclusive with ML -- e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.04844

[tyingq]

>Google doesn't care about organic results any more. That's BS, frankly.

Do they care less than they used to, though? Their placement on the screen as opposed to KG, widgets, and ads..and how that's progressed over time, seems to imply it.

[puranjay]

Google seems to have largely solved its biggest problem: spammy results. It's very hard to find sites in the top results for strong keywords with poor backlink profiles.

It has done this by a) Actually improving its spammy backlink detection, and b) Scary webmasters away from spammy SEO tactics through sudden updates like Panda/Penguin and straight up propaganda.

Once you solve the spam issue, Google's search results organically become better. Ergo, it doesn't need to spend that much time monitoring and improving them

[tyingq]

That's interesting, and would explain why no replacement was named for Matt.

I wonder how much they actually improved the webspam thing.

The search results you see today, versus years past, suggest a sort of "cheat" to do that...something like a seed set of trusted sites (big brands, universities, government sites, etc) , and weighting based on distance from those seeds.

I say that because I'll often get results that are heavy on authority, but low on relevance. What I'm looking for is on pages 2 and 3, on more niche, less prominent sites. It didn't used to be that way.

[congerous]

> Do they care less than they used to, though?

That's impossible to measure, but the arguments you have employed regarding personnel changes do not demonstrate your point.

[tyingq]

Okay...the top two publicly visible leaders in the space leaving in the same timeframe could mean something. Perhaps in this case it does not. I don't think either of us knows for sure. It does, however, pique my interest in what the group direction is now.

What of the decision to not replace Matt with a specific role or person? Is that not interesting?

And, again, I mentioned many other observations, not just Amit and Matt.

Edit: If the primary driver was lack of expertise in the ML direction, Uber seems an odd place to land, doesn't it?

[rifung]

Another explanation for their leaving is that the overall strategy around Search is changing and now outside of those two individuals' realm of expertise.

I work for Google but this is pure speculation on my part.

[freyir]

> the top two publicly visible leaders in the space leaving in the same timeframe could mean something

Again, Amit may not have been aligned with the direction they're taking search. That doesn't mean Google doesn't care. In fact, it could mean just the opposite.

[snarf]

Singhal's title at Uber says that he is in charge of marketplaces and maps, not the self-driving stuff. So this would be stuff like pricing, dispatch, supply optimization, and route optimization which rely on traditional algorithms and not ML. But I agree with your larger point and find his departure from Google curious. Even if they were moving search in another direction or he was completely bored with what he was working on and wanted change, I am shocked that they would let someone of his caliber leave Google.

[tyingq]

Supposedly, they leverage machine learning across those areas as well...perhaps not as the primary foundation, but used there nonetheless.

http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/02/uber-is-rolling-out-a-big-...

https://newsroom.uber.com/inferring-uber-rider-destinations/

There's other references, but you get the idea.