Amit Singhal, Google’s search chief, has spent the past 15 years creating the miracle that is the Google search box. Now, as he and his team face a shifting landscape in which phones and apps are starting to rival computers and websites, he is in a race to make Google “the Google of Apps.”

Mr. Singhal’s efforts were profiled in Thursday’s New York Times.

Following are excerpts from the interview, which has been condensed and edited:

Conor Dougherty: Is the classic Google search box dying?

Amit Singhal: Let’s go back and figure out what’s happening in the world because that’s how I work. Mobile revolution is full force. Everyone is walking around with more computing powers in their pockets than my desktop had five years back. On top of that, this computing power is connected to the largest data centers on this earth, so fundamentally the computing on my device is infinite.

So: Everyone is living on mobile devices. What’s so different about mobile devices? And when you start thinking from first principles and simple physics and muscle movements, you start thinking, of course the screens are small, No. 1, typing is incredibly hard, that’s No. 2, the device is always with you. No. 4: I live in apps. Eighty-five percent of user time is going in apps.

Now, when you think about those four things, you have to rethink what search means pretty much from first principles again. And that’s what we have been doing and actually we saw this coming five years back and we put all the machinery in place to get to where we are going.

C.D.: When I go watch someone on a desktop, Google is their gateway to the entire Internet, and when I watch somebody use a phone, it’s apps. So how do you deal with that?

A.S.: We are in a phase where search on mobile is growing at a very, very healthy pace. We recently told the world that we get more mobile searches than desktop searches in 10 countries. So mobile search is growing at a very healthy pace.

However, my job is not to just look at the trend today, my job is to look at what’s beyond the horizon. And beyond the horizon there is so much more people can do on their devices that is not possible today. Take a simple example. If my restaurant review app does not cut a deal with a table reservation service, then while I’m reading the reviews is there a way for me to book a table without having to pop out of there, cut and paste some text with me possibly or retype it, which is incredibly hard, into yet another app?

On a mobile device when you are living in apps and whenever you need assistance or help, Google should be right there and with Now on Tap we will try to be there.

C.D.: How much easier would your life be if apps didn’t exist?

A.S.: We don’t really think of it this way.

C.D.: Some people say we are moving to a “push” world from a “pull” world, where you had to tell Google what you wanted.

A.S.: This is covered under the third point I talked about – the device is always with me. And I just take it out and habitually unlock it, not having to pull something. And in those cases, push is a very fine paradigm.

But is pull going to end? No. Absolutely not, because no matter how much we advance computer science it would be almost impossible to anticipate 100 percent of the time what you need. So you would have to pull things that you need.

C.D.: One of the things that was powerful about Google the search engine is that it was the platform from which you accessed the web. And it feels like now you’re trying to stitch several things together, like Gmails and browsing history that go to Google Now, to know more things about people.

A.S.: I think of it as the web was the platform. Anyone could publish anything on that platform, there were no barriers to that. And Google was the intelligence layer on that, that allowed you to use that platform effectively. That intelligence is still needed. The platform has now moved to apps. But your need to find the best service for what you need to do has not gone away.

C.D.: People are online so much now. How do you see through the noise? Sometimes people search for “The Hunger Games” because they want tickets and sometimes it’s because they’re at a dinner arguing over who played which boyfriend.

A.S.: Context and probability. It’s very simple. There is no rocket science here. Context is typically time of day, what kind of searches go up and down. And what is the probability that someone would want to know this thing about “Hunger Games” or do this about “Hunger Games,” watch the show and so on and so forth, versus learn about the actors.

And we basically build our Knowledge Graph where we take the context-conditioned probability and we built our Knowledge Graph sorted by that. So, let’s pick something.

(Mr. Singhal pulls out his phone.)

I’m one of those weird guys who doesn’t follow “Hunger Games.”

C.D.: My wife got me into it.

A.S.: So apparently “Hunger Games” right now actually means “Mockingjay.” I know nothing about it, so I’m reading from my Knowledge Graph. And it is part of the film series “The Hunger Games” – people want to know what are the other movies in the series, and people want to know who was in it. So Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson – oh, Liam Hemsworth I know. He’s Thor!

C.D.: Actually, it’s his brother.

A.S.: Clearly, now you’re finding the inner geek in me. So here we go. We have sorted through the noise for you. Simple: Context plus probability.

C.D.: It’s hard not to be dazzled by all these inventions. But if you’re a company that is used to owning our viewfinder to the Internet, but now all of a sudden there are all these things people do on their phones that you may not be able to see, I wonder if it puts you in a point where – this sounds crazy – but you almost have to remind people that Google exists.

A.S.: First of all, on the web we built an amazing thing. It was so much more useful to the user so they came. It takes four letters – B-I-N-G – typed into Google to go to another place, right? But fundamentally you have to build something that does not get in the way of our users. It gives them what they are looking for in the most natural way. On desktop it was moving your cursor and typing a bunch of letters. On a mobile phone that paradigm has to become mobile, which means maybe talking to your phone, tapping on various objects. So the needs are still there.

C.D.: How do you organize your team around these paradigms? Do you have like Old Google and New Google?

A.S.: That never works. The way we do it is we basically have amazing people who have been running Google search for a very long time. And now we’ve built all those smarts and algorithmic insights into this new interface. So algorithms and learnings that we have had for 15 years of running Google are actually coming in tremendously handy in building the future. Without those, we would be lost today.