Google Search Chief Amit Singhal is retiring but he leaves an empire behind, an empire that he helped Google build for the past 15 years. The Google search engine has become such a centric part of our lives that we wouldn’t even be able to consider what it would be like to not have access to it anymore. Google search is one of the largest methods the world wide web connects, unless you count the internet itself. Large enough to invent the entire ‘googling’ term altogether.

And at the head of it, for the past decade and a half has been a man that saw the transition from a telephone and television-driven world to one that is now mostly ruled by computers and the internet. Following in his steps and the next in line to take the reins is John Giannandrea, an iconic individual in Google’s artificial intelligence department. And most likely, the company could not have found a better fit as the new head of Google Search as the two are not that different.

Take the AI robots that Google (but not just Google) is building as your first example: what makes them intelligent is the fact that they learn. By employing complex deep neural networks, man-made hardware can actually end up mimicking the way the human brain works but at much higher speed and potential. They can learn from sounds, from images and from text at immense performances, usually helping them outperform their creators.

The recently build AlphaGo program that researchers from the Google AI Project Deep Mind situated in London has managed to defeat a professional Go! Human player in a full-sized game. That is one of the best examples in which the built product manages to exceed the builder.

Similarly to full-fledged AI, you get Google Search, a feature that relies on the same networks. The Google search engine has grown so much since its inception that these days it will very often surprise how well it can tell what you’re about to ask from it. That is also thanks to the expanded fields that it draws its information from. These days, Google has access to nearly every single thing you do while you’re on the internet – so it’ll know what you’re interested in and be even faster than before in giving you exactly what you’re looking for.

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