[5][6] Born in Jhansi, a city in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India,[7] Singhal received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in computer science from IIT Roorkee in 1989.

[9] He wrote about his time at the University of Minnesota Duluth: UMD was the turning point in my life.

[9] At Cornell, Singhal studied with Gerard Salton, a pioneer in the field of information retrieval, the academic discipline which forms the foundation of modern search.

According to The New York Times, Singhal was the "master" of Google's ranking algorithm – the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user's question.

[20] Singhal served as the head of Google's core search ranking team[5][6] until his retirement announced on 26 February 2016.