Opinion
Building dog-walking or weed delivery apps is not saving the world
“Why am I going to go work on Uber for dog walkers? Or how to deliver weed to people better? Which is a, it's a fine problem to work on, but you're not saving the world if you're doing that.”
Assertion Partly supported
Cutts: HUD has over 8,000 employees and zero IT staff under 30
“HUD, Housing and Urban Development, has 8000 plus employees. According to the statistics, the number of IT experts, like, there's a job classification, 2210, blah blah blah, we'll just say IT people. The number of IT people under 30 at HUD is zero.”
What-if
Cutts: AltaVista would have crushed Google if they grasped ranking signals
“I remember when Alta Vista, I was worried they were going to crush us. Cause like, you know, you have a certain number of ranking signals and if they had twigged and caught on fast enough, they even like copied our appearance.”
Assertion Supported
Cutts: The SearchKing lawsuit established search results are First Amendment protected
“The result of that lawsuit was that search results are protected by the first amendment.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Early Google spam moderation lacked the trauma modern content moderators face
“Like Safe Search was just towards pornography, and spam was more like, buy cheap Viagra, and loan consolidation stuff, and so it wasn't nearly as bad as a lot of the content moderators had to deal with.”
Insight
Cutts: Fighting spam permanently conditions you to see exploit vectors everywhere
“There is one aspect, though, in which once you've seen all the different ways in which people try to spam and cheat and break the rules, you can't unsee that. Like, it's the black hat mindset. Like, once you realize, hey, here's a thing where people can recycl…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cutts: Platforms Will Not Be Able to Completely Automate Deepfake Detection
“Because I don't think you'll be able to completely automate the detection.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Cutts: Around 75% of USDS personnel joined under the Trump administration
“Something like 75% of the people who are in the U.S. Digital service joined during the Trump administration because we've got this Sort of two to four year tour of duty model.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cutts: USDS took four years to get permission to use Slack
“So it took us Four years to get access to Slack, for example get permission to be able to use Slack, at least within our particular group.”
Assertion Supported
Cutts: Google AdWords' first self-service customer was a Maine lobster business
“And the first self-service ad we got for AdWords was, I think, for a lobster company. Like, you could buy lobsters in Maine and have them, like, you know, pecked in dry ice and shipped to you.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cutts: In 2000, Google Engineers Doubted Spam Would Ever Threaten Search
“Google was great at the time, like back in 2000, it's, you'd have a hard time convincing people like there was ever going to be spammed.”
Insight
Cutts: Google Webspam Team Used Manual Reviews to Train Future Algorithms
“I, in general, with web spam, the philosophy was do as much as you can with an algorithm. Catch the residual with, you know, manual spam people who are, you know, well trained and extremely good at being able to catch things, and then use that as the training …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cutts: SRE practices and blameless postmortems saved Healthcare.gov
“Bringing in best practices, like let's get everybody in a room, try to do a blameless postmortem. Let's add monitor, Monitoring, you know, site reliability, engineering practices, those kinds of things. Like that was what allowed healthcare.gov to make it thro…”
Assertion Supported
Cutts: The US federal government never ran bug bounties before 2016
“And then the federal government had never done bug bounties before 2016.”
Assertion Supported
Cutts: Netscape invented software bug bounties in 1995
“Bug bounties were invented in 1995 by Netscape, which was a browser that came before Firefox, for those of you who weren't born then.”
Matt Cutts