Like few other people on the planet, Google’s Ben Gomes knows what interests the world.
Gomes is the engineer in charge of improving what you see when you Google. From one of the most important but little-known offices in the Googleplex in Mountain View, Gomes is responsible for shaping the automatic suggestions users get as they begin typing a query, and the few lines of text and links they get back, which Google calls “the snippet.” He sees the digital torrent of Google’s 1 billion daily search queries.
The interaction between user and search engine defines what Google is all about, and company co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have put Gomes in charge of improving that dialogue.
“I think of Ben as our diplomat,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience. “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.”
Despite the wave of Google products like Gmail, Android smart phones and digital maps, Google’s touchstone remains search, which according to estimates by the research firm IDC accounted for 92.5 percent of Google’s $6.8 billion in revenue in the second quarter. The history of Google search can be told through the evolution of technical features like the snippet, but it is also the story of the dogged behind-the-scenes work of engineers like Gomes, who is little known outside the Googleplex.
Gomes shares an office with three key search engineers, including one he has known since they were 13-year-old friends in…