Google Engineer and UK Alumnus Talks to Wired
LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 10, 2011) — Wired.com recently sat down for a Q&A with Google's top search engineers, Amit Singhal and University of Kentucky alumnus Matt Cutts, at the 2011 TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.
The article was in response to a new update Google announced last week that addressed the growing complaint of low-quality content sites that were ranking higher than higher-quality sites that seemed to be more important to users.
Read the article here.
Cutts, who is originally from Morehead, Ky., graduated from UK with degrees in both computer science and mathematics. He was a Singletary Scholar, a Gaines Fellow and was highly involved in undergraduate research. After getting his M.S. in computer graphics at UNC-Chapel Hill, he went to work for Google in 2000, when the company was still relatively small and new in the growing world of search engines.
Over the past 10 years, Cutts has worked in search engine optimization, heading up the Google webspam team that prevents people from using unethical techniques to rank their sites higher than they should be. He also developed the first version of "SafeSearch," Google's family filter.
Cutts feels his education at UK prepared him thoroughly to work for one of the largest companies in the world.
"You want to be a well-rounded person, and UK gives you a wonderful grounding for the real world. The computer science program trained us on everything from how to install Linux to using different editors, and I ended up using all of those skills in my career at Google."
MEDIA CONTACT: Jenny Wells, (859) 257-1754 ext. 254; Jenny.Wells@uky.edu