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 […]

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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.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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