Do you know who is competing with Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella? He is a class 10 student and at the age of 16, he designed a personalised search engine that claims to be as high as 47% more accurate than Google and about 21% more accurate on an average. Anmol Tukrel, an Indian-origin Canadian citizen has taken around 60 hours code and build a search engine, which is a part of the submission to the Google Science Fair. The Google competition is applicable for those between ages 13 and 18. His tinkering kit included a computer with at least 1 gigabyte of free storage space, a python-language development environment, a spreadsheet program and access to Google and New York Times.
According to reports, when Tukrel was in India for a short internship in Bangalore, that’s when he came to know about Google already having a personalized search engine, he planned to take it to a next level.
Is this search engine accurate?
To find its answer, he limited his search query to this year’s news articles from The New York Times. He created several fictitious users with different interests and corresponding web histories. Tukrel then fed this information to both Google and his interest-based search engine. Finally, the results from each search engine were compared. Tukrel, the student of Holy Trinity School in Toronto, said he learnt to code in his third grade, and subsequently picked up on mathematics and coding.
Tukrel submitted his paper to the International High School Journal of Science last month, and hopes to study computer science at Stanford University. But before that, he wants to develop a news aggregator based on this technology, and licence it to a few digital marketing agencies as well. Would he become a fellow at Paypal founder Peter Theil’s foundation, where one is required to drop out of college to try an idea? “To be honest, it’s incredibly stupid to drop out,” said Tukrel. “It’s very arrogant to think that your idea is so good, that you don’t need to learn anything.” But, Tukrel also runs a company, which has a palindromic name: Tacocat Computers. But, is he legally allowed to? “Yes. You just need parental consent.” And, What Next? “Eleventh Grade”.