by Xinhua writers Chen Wenxian, Du Zhen
JERUSALEM, May 25 (Xinhua) -- With "fantastic" dreams, Israel-born Adam Singolda has been building the "content discovery platform" Taboola into a global leading one in just a decade since its founding in 2007.
"I couldn't find anything to watch on television and got tired of looking for a good TV show. Then I asked myself why can't a TV show look for me," Singolda, founder and CEO of Taboola, told Xinhua in an exclusive interview. "That was the beginning of Taboola."
With this sparkling idea, Singolda, an honored alum of the Israeli Defense Forces' elite computer science training program, started founding Taboola, a "search engine in reverse." In his words, a "perfect" search engine would be one that people actually don't have to search for anything.
Now, Taboola is delivering personalized recommendations to about 1.4 billion users every month. According to Singolda, there are about 3 billion people on the Internet and about half of them see Taboola or Taboola recommendation at least once a month.
Though now headquartered in New York, Singolda still locates Taboola's R&D center in Israel. Technology always plays the most important role in the growth of his firm. Singolda has never stopped making efforts of utilizing the most advanced technology for his creation.
At present, about 400 out of around 850 employees, or more than a third, are engineers and product managers. "We are heavy on technology," said Singolda.
He started the recommendation engine initially using machine learning. As more and more data should be processed, he turned to deep learning more than two years ago. "Deep learning is the evolution of machine learning and a lot more developed than machine learning," noted Singolda.
Deep learning utilization gives Taboola an advantage when the recommendation engine works with world media partners and more than 10,000 advertisers worldwide from global brands to small-medium enterprises in multiple industries including finance, insurance, e-commerce, travel, gaming and jewelry.
In the Internet era, people are worried about the flooding of fake news. "We don't support fake news and deceptive content, and we don't support gambling, drugs, cigarettes and a long list of things," Singolda said.
To this end, Taboola has a team of almost 50 employees to review content. "We have Internal censorship in many ways," he said.
One of Singolda's dream is to expand to the Chinese market. He is full of confidence to step into the Chinese market with the support of his strategic partner Baidu, a search engine giant in China.
"I'm really excited about it, because there is a massive opportunity to marry digital world with offline world in China," he said.
At present, Taboola has joined hands with some of China's media. "It's just a beginning," said Singolda. "We expect to generate more than 1 billion U.S. dollars in revenues in 2018, and I hope China will become a big part of our business though we're just getting started."
In the eyes of the 37-year-old founder, Taboola is like Disneyland for geeks, "because we have dreams all the time and we make them reality."
With regard to the future of Taboola, Singolda holds the dreams of making his company bigger. "One day, every TV, every device and every car should have Taboola," he noted.
