Google's search chief is retiring

Google's search chief, Amit Singhal, is retiring, he announced Wednesday morning.

He has been at Google for 15 years and will be leaving the company to spend more time doing philanthropic work, he wrote in a Google Plus post. His last day at Google will be February 26.

"Now is a good time to make this important life change," he said. "Things are in amazing shape. Search is stronger than ever, and will only get better in the hands of an outstanding set of senior leaders who are already running the show day-to-day."

Singhal joined the company way back in 2000, and he has since been honored with the title Google Fellow (meant for the most talented engineers) for his work on Google's search algorithm.

He was responsible for running the team that makes changes to the way Google Search works.

He'll be replaced by John Giannandrea, a research and machine-learning executive at Google who is known for spearheading the Knowledge Graph. That's the informational sidebar that tries to save you from having to click any links that you sometimes see on the right side of the screen when you search for something.

Singhal's departure comes about six months after Larry Page named Sundar Pichai the new CEO of Google as part of the formation of new parent company, Alphabet.

Here's his retirement blog post in its entirety:

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