An early employee at Google, Matt Cutts works to modernize the US government as an administrator at U.S. Digital Service (USDS).

Why you should listen

Matt Cutts works for the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), a non-partisan technology group in the Executive Office of the President that improves government services relied upon by millions of Americans. He first joined the U.S. Digital Service in 2016 at Department of Defense. He joined Google in 2000 and became head of its webspam team where he protected the quality of Google's search results and answered questions about search engine optimization and ranking algorithms. He wrote the first version of SafeSearch, Google's family filter.

Cutts is widely known for his 30-day challenges to try something new and is an avid (but slow) long-distance runner. He holds a master's degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and bachelor's degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Kentucky.

More news and ideas from Matt Cutts

Live from TED2019

Short talks, big ideas: The talks of TED Unplugged at TED2019

April 17, 2019

In a fast-paced session of talks curated by TED arts and design curator Chee Pearlman and hosted with improv leader Anthony Veneziale, 12 members of the TED community shared ideas in a special format: each had to keep their talks under six minutes, with auto-advancing, timed slides. And yes, the mic does cut after six minutes!

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We humans

Got too much stuff? Try these 7 tips to help pare down

September 13, 2018

Most of us have no problem admitting we have more than we need. The difficulty lies in the next steps: How to get rid of it? What room to tackle first? Should we toss, regift, donate, recycle, repurpose, sell? It’s enough to drive a person to lie down and wait until the impulse to tidy passes. This gentle advice from TED speakers will help you look at the excess in your life, get rid of it, and restore some order to your space.

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