"The Indian manufacturing base could get a lot more efficient over time, " Mr. Singhal said.

WSJ: IKEA Plans $1.9 Billion Investment in India

Singhal, who joined Google 12 years ago, emphasized a vision of search based on the sci-fi vision in Star Trek.

FORBES: Google's 4 Biggest Technical Challenges, According To Search Guru Amit Singhal - SXSW

Mr. Singhal said his team is working independently of any advertising considerations.

WSJ: Google Gives Search a Refresh

"Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more, " said Amit Singhal in the firm's official blog.

BBC: Screenshot of Google+

Singhal pointed to Google Now, which is designed to send users information before they even search for it, such as flight delay information, or when someone should leave for a meeting, taking into account traffic.

FORBES: Google's 4 Biggest Technical Challenges, According To Search Guru Amit Singhal - SXSW

Mr. Singhal said Google and the Metaweb team, which then numbered around 50 software engineers, have since expanded the size of the index to more than 200 million entities, partly by developing "extraction algorithms, " or mathematical formulas that can organize data scattered across the Web.

WSJ: Google Gives Search a Refresh

In a post Friday on Google's blog, Amit Singhal, a top search executive, said Google's Web "search algorithms, " which determine how websites are ranked in search results, would now take into account the number of valid copyright removal notices that Google receives for a particular site.

WSJ: Google to Penalize Websites Flagged by Copyright Holders

His boss, Ashok Singhal, told a gathering of VHP faithful in December that Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen was helping Christianize India by advocating universal literacy--Christian schools presumably would do the job--and that the Nobel committee was in on the plot, having already given a peace prize to that famous Christian troublemaker Mother Teresa (Singhal subsequently denied the statement).

CNN: ASIANOW - TIME Asia