Google's search engine is facing some serious challenge. With social networks getting more important and people looking for answers instead of information, competitors like Microsoft's Bing and Wolfram Alpha are creating lot of buzz. In an interview to TOI, Amit Singhal, Google's global head for search engine technology, talks about the competition from Microsoft, issues surrounding privacy of users and Knowledge Graph, a feature launched by the company on Wednesday.

Q. Google can't access most of the data generated by Facebook or Twitter users. Yet, after a deal last week Microsoft's Bing will do it. How will Google respond?

I think the right question here is not that Google doesn't offer Twitter real-time search anymore or that it can't crawl through Facebook's data. The issue is what kind of web we are building where special deals are required if someone wants to access information.
We invested a lot of money and time in developing social search, and at a time worked with Twitter. But unfortunately Twitter and Facebook don't want to work with us now. The beauty of the web is that it is open. Closed systems hamper innovation in long term. We have this fantastic technology to index information in social networking sites. But we can't use it because Twitter and Facebook are closed. Users can't benefit from it.

Q. Ethics of the closed and open systems aside, how does Google hope to meet the new challenge from Bing?

We are not sitting idle. We do understand the importance of social search. That's the reason why we launched Search Plus Your World (SPYW) a few months ago. It takes the information from all our websites, including Google+ that is a social networking site, and serves results that are contextual and are likely to be important for the users. We continue to invest a lot in social search. We are not motivated by what others are doing but creating infrastructure for the future.

Q. But at the same time, there are privacy concerns over (SPYW). And some users even say that search results part of SPYW feel intrusive and not too relevant...

There are two issues: Privacy and quality. And on both counts, I feel there is lot of misunderstanding. At Google, we care deeply about the privacy of user. That's the reason why unlike many other companies, we are very transparent about what we do or does not do with the user information. We also give fine-grained control to users. The concerns over quality are unfounded. We have seen that users like SPYW results. But if you want old-style search results, you can switch off SPYW. The option is there.

Q. What is Knowledge Graph?
When Google started, the idea was to index information and find keywords. Now it is about knowledge. For example, when somebody searches Taj Mahal, telling him about the monument in Agra may not be the best solution. May be, the user is looking for a hotel named Taj Mahal.
But knowledge is a big fuzzy word. Computers find it difficult to understand context. In 2010, we acquired Metaweb, which worked on building large collaborative knowledge base. Internally, we have a number of solutions to improve search results. One of them is Knowledge Graph, comprising information about millions of interconnected entities and their characteristics. With Knowledge Graph we are moving to away from (search) strings to things.