Born in
Jhansi, a city in the state of
Uttar Pradesh,
India, Singhal received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in
computer science from
IIT Roorkee in 1989. He continued his computer science education in the
United States, and received an
M.S. degree from
University of Minnesota Duluth in 1991. He wrote about his time at the University of Minnesota Duluth: Singhal continued his studies at
Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York, and received a
Ph.D. degree in 1996. 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.
John Battelle, in his book
The Search, calls Gerard Salton "the father of digital search." After getting a Ph.D. in 1996, Singhal joined
AT&T Labs (previously a part of
Bell Labs), where he continued his research in information retrieval, speech retrieval and other related fields. == Controversy ==