Ben Gomes
Ben Gomes
Ben Gomes is the Vice President of Core Search at Google. [1]
Marissa Mayer, Google's former vice president of search products and user experience, says:
I think of Ben as our diplomat. It's Google; it's search. There's a lot of big personalities; there's a lot of opinions, and Ben is the reasonable one that can help build the bridges. When we look back, there was a point where Larry and Sergey really felt like we needed to name a search czar. "... And there was only one natural choice - this was back in 2002 - and that was Ben.
Early Life
He was born in Tanzania, and raised in Bangalore, India. His father was into car dealing and his mother was a school teacher. At first, he was more fascinated with chemistry than computers. So much so, he recounts, that one day he picked up some sulphuric acid from a city shop, and walked into his school, "swinging the bottle in my hand, so happy". But then he went to a school with his classmates like Krishna Bharat, a computer fiend who later created Google News, and Sabeer Bhatia, founder of HoTMaiL. So when his brother bought him a small microcomputer in 1983, young Ben joined a small bunch of people interested in machines in what then still was a technophobic country. Together with Krishna Bharat he learned about computers by playing around with a ZX Spectrum, an eight-bit home computer released in 1982.
programming information, just trying to guess
Trying to teach himself electronics as a seventh-grader, the only book Gomes could find was a college-level textbook.
I stared at that book for weeks, hoping that somehow I would understand something there. But it was way beyond me.
Growing up in Bangalore, Gomes' main access to information was the two books a month he and his mother could each borrow from the British Consul library. In 1988 he moved to United States of America to study Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Career
Ben Gomes, VP of Search at Google is Interviewed by Loic Le Meur at LeWeb Paris 2012"
After leaving University, Gomes was working at Sun Microsystems on the Java programming language when a classmate called him to tell him he had joined a small start-up called Google in Mountain View.
He told me it seemed like a really good place with really good people
He joined Google in 1999.
Then, some searches could take up to 20 seconds.
Search was about basically finding the words that 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
Gomes and Bharat, his childhood friend, now work together at Google.
Bharat invented Google News, and Gomes has been responsible for a range of changes to the search engine, from adding interface features such as spelling corrections in the world's major languages to improving how search results are ranked - what he calls "the bread and butter of what we do."
Last year alone, Google introduced around 500 improvements and features to its search engine.
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 a touch screen. It can enable a new kind of interface. So we realised we want to build an interface that was much like the way you talk to some person and ask a question
Education
Ben riding a Google bicycle
He received a MSc and a PhD in Computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. [1] While at ICSI, Gomes worked on the development of pSather, a programming language that enabled easy parallelization. Several students who worked on pSather and related projects have gone on to work at Google, including David Stoutamire and David Bailey.
There's a lot of stuff at Google that mirrors the range of interests in Jerry's group - from low-level programming to higher-level questions about human-computer interactions.
His interests spanned that range as well.
Feldman said:
Ben was the only person who was active in all aspects of parallelization that were going on at the time, from neural modeling and hardware architecture to high level parallel programming and optimization. It was the best possible preparation for what he ended up doing.
Professor Srini Narayanan, who joined ICSI as a graduate student soon after Gomes and has since gone on to lead the AI Group, said Gomes helped create the collegial spirit in Feldman's group:
Everybody liked everybody, and Ben was largely responsible for that.
He received a Bachelor of Science in Computer engineering from the Case Western Reserve University. There, he was active in ACM, IEEE, Debate Club. [1] He was the first in his family to attend college.