Anna Patterson, Cuil Founder, Returns To Google

TechCrunch reports Anna Patterson has updated her LinkedIn profile to say she is now back at Google.

Anna left Google to launch a ‘Googler killer’ named Cuil. Cuil, a new search engine, had a ton of hype around it and had a lot of smart people working there, including Anna. A few months ago Cuil went offline after not being able to raise more funding and has remained offline since.

Anna appears to now be a Director of Google Research at Google. Prior, she worked at Google since 2004 as the architect of Google’s large search index, TeraGoogle, that launched in early 2006 and technical lead of one of the two Web ranking groups at Google, in charge of GoogleBase, and managed for the core piece of Google’s ad-matching technology.

Anna’s husband actually coined the name for Cuil. According to Wikipedia:

The Irish ancestry of Anna Patterson’s husband Tom Costello sparked the name Cuil, which the company states is taken from a series of Celtic folklore stories involving a character, Fionn mac Cumhaill, they erroneously refer to as Finn MacCuil. The company says that Cuil is Irish for knowledge and hazel.

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Employees | Search Engines: Cuil


About The Author: is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here.

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  • http://www.michael-martinez.com/ Michael Martinez

    They could make a movie about their experiment, “One Night at MacCuil’s”….

  • http://goo.gl/ZQX5 Michael Dadona

    Good to know this latest news about Anna and Cuil, thank you for providing a type of “lesson and learn” for readers to take.

    What I want to add here is, lately, there are many SEOs and SEMs writers keep on bashing Google. Not less bashing Bing and Yahoo. I think it must be stopped. The best thing to feed readers is to publish salient information about their new features introduced by pointing out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for readers to analyze. Making SEO and SEM sites be the readers’ main reference sites before visiting principals’ sites.

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