- The interview is with Matt Cotts, the administrator of the US Digital Service and former head of the web spam team at Google.
- In 2000, Google was a startup with only a few employees, and the culture was focused on working long hours and tackling projects informally.
- Projects were delegated based on needs, and Cotts ended up in the ads group after initially working on SafeSearch.
- The success of Google was uncertain at the time, especially during the dot-com crash, but they managed to overcome challenges and competition.
- The development of Google's advertising platform, AdWords, involved experimentation and learning from user feedback.
- The interview also touches on issues such as common carrier vs. publisher status and the importance of delivering high-quality search results.

- The video discusses various topics related to Google, including YouTube's efforts to combat spam and the experiences of content moderators.
- The speaker, Paul Matzkoff, shares his experiences working on SafeSearch and detecting pornography.
- He also talks about the mindset of black hat spammers and the challenges of combating spam.
- Matzkoff discusses the perception of search engine optimization (SEO) and the importance of working together to achieve better search results.
- The video also touches on Matzkoff's long tenure at Google and his transition to joining the US Digital Service.

- The US Digital Service is a team of technologists who work to improve government systems and services.
- They were formed in response to the failure of healthcare.gov and focus on bringing in best practices from the tech industry.
- The team works on various projects, including fixing database issues and conducting discovery sprints to identify problems and constraints.
- Members of the US Digital Service have limited tours of duty ranging from 6 months to 4 years.
- Many people who join the team find it fulfilling and choose to stay in government or work in civic tech.
- The team consists of engineers, designers, product managers, procurement experts, and lawyers.
- The onboarding process for joining the US Digital Service is streamlined and can be completed in 90 seconds.
- The team aims to educate government employees about technology and its potential impact.
- The government often relies on contractors for technology projects, and the US Digital Service works to improve the selection process for contractors.
- While there are challenges, being part of the US Digital Service allows for meaningful impact on a large scale.

- USDS focuses on providing modern tools and support to federal partners in order to improve government work
- They prioritize enabling good things to happen and collaborating with subject matter experts in the government
- USDS helps federal partners decide whether to outsource or build software in-house, based on their unique needs
- Government technology has been lagging behind, but progress has been made in areas like bug bounties and cloud migration
- USDS primarily focuses on implementing systems and processes, rather than data authenticity or spam tactics
- Communication of Google's algorithm changes and SEO best practices involved being honest but careful about revealing new spam tactics.

- The speaker discusses the importance of honesty and framing in communication.
- They suggest that smart tech professionals can contribute to government discussions by attending meetings and offering their expertise.
- The speaker also encourages smart tech professionals to run for office and make a difference at the state and federal levels.
- They mention government tech startups and the potential for profit in this field.
- The speaker emphasizes the need for high-performing startups to adopt a human-centered design approach, which the government has been successful in implementing.
- They highlight the importance of user feedback and good design in creating a positive user experience.
- The speaker mentions the value of goodwill and how it can impact a company's success.
- They discuss the need for companies to listen to their customers and consider their preferences and needs.
- The speaker shares examples of companies that have succeeded by delighting their customers and delivering a product that works well.
- They emphasize the importance of thoughtful design and caring for the user.
- The speaker concludes by discussing misconceptions and misunderstandings about the internet among legislators, the government, and the general population.

- The speaker discusses misconceptions about the internet and how lawmakers should approach legislation regarding it.
- They mention the importance of not hard-coding specific technologies into laws and instead focusing on the desired outcome.
- The impact of Google on people's search habits and attention spans is discussed, as well as the possibility of living without Google.
- The speaker highlights the need for mindfulness and stepping away from technology to focus on real-life interactions.
- The difference between working at Google and the US Digital Service is discussed, with the latter being seen as more meaningful and inspiring due to its focus on public service.
- The speaker mentions that many people are interested in contributing to government service and that their skills can be valuable in improving government processes.

- The speaker discusses the option of taking a leave from a big company for 6 months without giving up stock options.
- They mention that trust in government is influenced by interactions with the government, and suggest that short tours can help regain trust in government.
- The speaker expresses their technical assessment that backdooring encryption is not supported, but acknowledges that policy decisions are made through a government process.
- They mention a job opportunity at the Federal Trade Commission for a technology coordinator, and highlight Tech Congress as a group that brings technology professionals into Congress to help with policy discussions.
- The speaker provides a website (usds.gov/apply) for job applications at the US Digital Service, and mentions specific roles they are looking for.

- Matt Cotts, administrator of the US Digital Service and former head of the web spam team at Google, discusses his experiences at Google and the importance of delivering high-quality search results.
- The interview covers topics such as the development of Google's advertising platform, combating spam, and the mindset of black hat spammers.
- Cotts also talks about his transition to joining the US Digital Service, a team of technologists working to improve government systems and services.
- The US Digital Service focuses on bringing best practices from the tech industry to government projects and aims to educate government employees about technology.
- They work on various projects, have limited tours of duty, and consist of engineers, designers, product managers, procurement experts, and lawyers.
- The team's onboarding process is streamlined, and they prioritize enabling good things to happen and collaborating with subject matter experts in the government.
- The US Digital Service helps federal partners decide whether to outsource or build software in-house and focuses on implementing systems and processes.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of communication, honesty, and framing in government discussions and encourages tech professionals to get involved in government and run for office.
- They also discuss the value of human-centered design, user feedback, and caring for the user in creating a positive user experience.
- The speaker highlights misconceptions about the internet, the impact of Google on search habits, and the need for mindfulness and real-life interactions.
- Working at the US Digital Service is seen as more meaningful and inspiring due to its focus on public service, and many people are interested in contributing to government service.
- The speaker mentions job opportunities at the US Digital Service and other organizations, and provides a website for job applications.

Matt Cutts is the Administrator of the US Digital Service and previously he was the head of the webspam team at Google.

https://twitter.com/mattcutts

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

https://twitter.com/craigcannon

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.

Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ 

***

Topics

00:00 - Intro

00:18 - Working at Google in 2000

2:30 - Did Google's success feel certain?

3:35 - Building self-service ads

7:05 - The evil unicorn problem

8:05 - Lawsuits around search

10:30 - Content moderation and spam

14:20 - Matt's progression over 17 years at Google

17:00 - Deepfakes

18:25 - Joining the USDS

20:45 - What the USDS does

23:25 - Working at the USDS

26:25 - Educating people in government about tech

28:40 - Creating a rapid feedback loop within government

31:30 - Michael Wang asks - How does USDS decide whether to outsource something to a private company, or build the software in house?

32:40 - Spencer Clark asks - It would seem that the government is so far behind the private industry’s technology. To what extent is this true and what can be done about it? How should we gauge the progress of institutions like the USDS?

35:45 - Stephan Sturges asks - With GANs getting more and more powerful is the USDS thinking about the future of data authenticity?

38:05 - John Doherty asks - How difficult was it to communicate Google’s algorithm changes and evolving SEO best practices without leaking new spam tactics?

40:00 - Vanman0254 asks - How can smart tech folks better contribute to regulatory and policy discussions in government?

42:20 - Ronak Shah asks - What's your best pitch to high-performing startups in the Bay Area to adopt more of human centered design (something that the government has been moving towards surprisingly well, but that some fast moving startups have neglected resulting in controversy)

49:40 - Adam Hoffman asks - What are legislators, the government, and the general populace most “getting wrong” in how they conceptualize the internet?

51:15 - Raphael Ferreira asks - Is it possible to live without google? How do you think google affected people in searching for answers and content, now that’s we find everything in just one click?

55:05 - Tim Woods asks - Which job was more fun and why?

56:55 - Working in government vs private industry

1:00:30 - Snehan Kekre asks - What is Matt's view of the ongoing debate about backdooring encryption for so called lawful interception?

So, for those who don't know you, you are the administrator of the US Digital Service, and previously you were at Google where you were the head of the web spam team and also the 71st employee in the year 2000.

Oh man, so we had 3 people start that day and that was a new record at the time.

Now you've got like hundreds of people starting each week.

But the crazy thing is it was a startup back then.

I remember 1 of the first projects I worked on was SafeSearch.

I got something working and I was really happy so I was going to head home and I was like speeding because I was super excited I got this thing working, got a speeding ticket.

And so I literally remember working every weekend until at some point people were like, oh, 3 or 4 years in, we don't work on weekends anymore.

And I was like, oh, now the culture's changed a little bit.

But it's super weird to be like, the people who were just folks, Amit or Lucas or whoever, then eventually became entire departments.

Sales departments and people who dealt with logs and privacy.

But back then it was just a small group of people.

Because I know the story with PB creating Gmail.

How did projects get delegated and chosen?

Paul Matzkoff Well, it was funny because I started out, I did a safe search and then there was this ski off-site.

Everybody fit on 1 bus, 1 50 person bus back then.

So that was a great introduction to the company.

And I was skiing and on a lift with a manager.

And she was like, hey Matt, you like doing front-end programming?

And I was like, sure, I like front-end programming.

And then like, boom, guess what, you're in the ads group now.

I'm like, wait, I don't want to be in the ads group.

But there were only like 5 people and they needed help, so I was like trying to help out.

We did like geolocation, and it took like a year to claw my way back towards ranking.

So it was very informal, it was very much like, here's a problem, we got to go swarm and tackle it.

Even writing SafeSearch was because there was a partner that wanted it.

And so we're like, okay, can we build this in time?

Paul Matzkoff So on a self-hosted version?

To what degree did you feel like the success of Google was certain at the time?

I mean, If you go back, I think Google had raised like $25 million from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia or whatever.

And so, as I recall, the dot-com crash happened like March of 2000, winter apocalypse.

Everybody was like, this is going to be terrible.

And so it wasn't at all clear that we were going to be able to make it.

I remember when AltaVista, I was worried they were going to crush us.

Because you got a certain number of ranking signals, and if they had twigged and caught on fast enough, they even copied our appearance.

They had a little front end that you could set it, where you could be, I think they called it like goofy.

It was like rainbow colored, so it looked a little like Google.

I mean, trying to make sure that in those early days Microsoft didn't realize how much money was coming from search engines.

can you walk through that product development?

You're like, oh, this might not be a thing.

And then a certain type of ad takes off, or you tried something and it failed.

So it was wild, because back then, people were like, do you have salespeople sell stuff, which was the default?

And do you sell by CPM, cost per thousand, or do you sell by cost per click?

was this thing called Overture where people could bid on things.

And so there was a whole bunch of shifts in strategy where people are like, let's figure out how to do this.

So at 1 point, I was in the ads group and they said, we're going to do this prototype of self-service advertising.

So we're going to make some little ads on the right-hand side.

And Oh man, I forgot to turn off caching when I ran that experiment and I nearly melted Google at that point, which was not cool.

Because they were just dynamically serving them constantly to everyone?

Well no, no, this was super, super prototype.

So it was like the ads were like pool tables and PlayStation and I forget what the third 1 was.

No, but in order to show enough, you had to have it in the experiment for like 30% of people, because not that many people were searching for PlayStations or whatever.

And so I turned off caching for 30% of Google, which radically, like racks were melting down, all this sort of stuff.

So I remember we looked at the click-through rate, and it was really low, because we just picked some copy.

We're like, would you like to buy a PlayStation now?" kind of thing.

And as I recall, Marissa was like, this is not good for the user experience.

And Larry Page was like, well maybe, but I could imagine click-through going up.

That surprises me, because I've heard stories about banner ads, for example, in the beginning having crazy click-through rate.

Paul Matzkoff You know, the only thing I can think of is the copy probably sucked, it was off on the right-hand side, people probably didn't know what exactly is this thing over here.

And it was kind of fun because there were like multicolor ads back then.

Were you like throwing in pictures and trying to make that?

Paul Matzkoff No pictures, but I remember like a 1 pixel darker color boundary.

Like they were really pretty ads, but I think people just didn't even know to click on them.

And it turns out, having people willing to put in the A.B.

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, packed in dry ice and shipped to you.

And that was the point when we were like, oh, there's this whole long tail of people who want to reach people who are looking for the things that they're looking, you know, selling.

Did you like call the person in Maine up?

Paul Matzkoff I hope that they got in touch with that person.

Craig Dobson You'd figure it'd be like a pizza shop in San Jose.

I really hope they got in touch and were like, did you know you were the very first 1?

And I remember I went to a search conference a few years back and somebody was like, hey, I was 1 of the first AdWords advertisers and I was like, oh cool, what did you do?

And he was talking about how he tweaked all the keywords and did all the testing, but people were willing to put in that work because you could get, you could find these little cavities where nobody else was searching, and if you found the right word, you could actually get great click-through rates and a great response.

I think you see it today with YouTube, right?

People realize, oh, there's nothing for this kind of flat Earth search, therefore they just fill it up.

Yeah, so we used to call that the evil unicorn problem.

Because people come to Google and they'll search for something like flat earth, right?

And there's no good answers because you're looking for the most reputable, useful results to give people.

And like there's not that many legitimate folks who are like, Oh yeah, the earth's totally flat.

So, but you still have to show 10 results unless you like change the interface to say you're in a, in an untrusted area, which we, we experimented with that later.

And, and so like the folks who realize there are people searching for evil unicorns, everybody thinking unicorns are perfect, nice, whatever, but you can still search for evil unicorn, and then you've got to have 10 results for evil unicorn.

And so it's sort of this lacuna, like a lack of information.

And so when there's not high quality information, you still end up showing something.

And so the folks who realize they can make flat earth content or whatever, we're filling in a gap.

And so at that point you're just like, hey listen, we're a common carrier to a certain extent.

Craig Dobson It gets really hard with common carrier and publisher and 230 and all that sort of stuff.

So there were literally people who sued us because we took action on them because we considered them spammers.

Like they were literally selling page rank.

Like I will link to you and the amount of money is based on the amount of page rank I have.

And then we took action and they were like, that's unfair.

And we're like, like, wow, like we rank the search results.

And so there was 1 called Search King, and the result of that lawsuit was that search results are protected by the First Amendment.

And then there was 1 called Kinderstart, where they were saying, page rank is an algorithm, and so you have no ability or right to 0 out somebody's page rank or to take action.

But if you follow that to the natural logical extreme, then you'd never be able to tweak or adjust the search engine or manually say, oh, this one's spam, but we haven't caught it yet, our algorithms aren't ready yet, so we're not allowed to take action on it.

But it was super interesting to see how people thought about search, whether it was like a newspaper, or whether it was like a card catalog at a library, or like a magazine.

And people just want high quality relevant results.

They don't wanna delve too deeply into, I don't wanna, we tried giving people knobs, where you could tweak how reputable something would be and nobody ever wanted to.

They just click on the first 5 or whatever.

So where do you fall now with things like YouTube?

Where you just go deep, deep, deep, and you might not even know you're in it.

So I think 1 good thing about Google, having left there several years ago now, is that the people really care about trying to do the right thing.

And so trying to return high quality relevant results.

It's a different silo within Google, but a lot of the DNA is the same.

So when you see searches for something that doesn't actually exist, and so spammers are ranking for it on YouTube, YouTube wants to take care of that.

And so I think some of the recent stuff where people are getting down a rabbit hole, I'm sure that there are engineers thinking very hard about how do we solve this problem and make it work better.

Okay, I could talk to you about Google back in the day for a very long time.

But I was curious, so being early on the web spam team and then running Web Spam.

You've read these stories about content moderators overseas looking at horrible stuff.

More so with SafeSearch, where you were trying to detect pornography and non-family safe things.

And for a while, so Larry and Sergey shared an office for a long time because they were on the road, and we were tight on real estate.

And so for a long time I had the cubicle right outside of Larry and Sergey's office.

And this was right when I was working on SafeSearch.

And so I was like, trying to see if I could find stuff that had slipped through.

And if I did, I would, you know, try to tweak word weights and stuff like that.

And so at some point, Colpreet, who was our first lawyer at Google, came by and he was like, hey, Hey Matt, we know you have to like look for pornography.

It's a vital thing that you do, but like, it kind of weirds out when visitors are coming to visit Larry and Sergey.

in your line of sight, It looks kind of like you're looking at porn and we know you're doing it for work, but could you put like a whiteboard up to block it?

So yeah, I did end up seeing a lot of stuff, but it was a little bit of a different time.

Like SafeSearch was just towards pornography And spam was more like, buy cheap Viagra, loan consolidation stuff.

And so it wasn't nearly as bad as a lot of the content moderators had to deal with.

There is 1 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.

Once you realize, hey, here's a thing where people can recycle their conference badges, my mind immediately goes to, what if that's not the conference?

And then people have free conference badges that they can then use for their friends on the last 2 or 3 days of a conference.

You literally can't look around the world and not think about how is somebody going to abuse that system.

Right, so now do you feel that people are like fundamentally evil?

So even, It was funny, whenever we were working with, there's a lot of publishers and websites that do search engine optimization or SEO.

And there was a little bit of folks early on who were like, oh that's all evil, that's 100%, you're trying to manipulate things, therefore bad, therefore take action.

And there was a VP of engineering, his name was Ors, who really had the right approach.

He was like, look, these are small businesses, they're trying to do the best they can to make sure that they rank well because they think they have some of the best services on the internet.

So we shouldn't begrudge them trying to rank well.

We should give them good things that they can do, like make your site better, make it faster, make it easy to navigate.

And so that was really kind of a turning point where a lot of folks who might have been antagonistic towards SEO, saw it more like, this is energy which can be channeled in a positive way.

Which I think is critical, because folks are just trying to do the best thing for their business.

But for the most part, people just want to know, give me the ground rules.

Make sure that everybody's behaving consistently by that.

If there's somebody I see violating the ground rules, can I tell you about that, and will you take action on that?

And so trying to make sure that people know the right positive things to work on and the right negative things to avoid, I think help diffuse a lot of the tension where it shouldn't be SEOs or websites versus Google, or a search engine, it should be working together to give the best results.

Another thing that's interesting about your time at Google was just how long it was.

I think the average tenure now is 2 years or less

Yeah, I stayed there for a month short of 17 years.

So how did you think about your work over that long, long period?

Because you came right out of a PhD, right?

I'm like, I don't think I'm going to go back, Dan.

How long was it before you were managing people?

What did that whole progression look like for you?

Yeah, I got to code for about 5 years before they, like in 2004, 2005.

Okay, so worked on SafeSearch, worked in the ads group, and then I was on quality.

Was on quality for the rest of my time at Google.

And it was funny because for a while I was like, spam's going to be an issue, and it was not a popular opinion within Google.

Yeah, for a long time people thought Google.

David B.: Because they thought the algorithm was so good?

PhD.: Yes, they thought Google couldn't be spammed.

And it was because I worked on SafeSearch and I found a loophole that I was like, oh no, oh there's going to be a problem here.

Yeah, so you used an example on the history of the internet podcast where someone bought an expired domain, turned it into a porn site, stuff like that.

Chris Sennett Exactly, and so after that, I remember having an argument with a very early employee of Google who was like, well that's easy, you just solve expired domains and then you're done.

But that doesn't take into account guest books and award programs and fake awards that you'd give just to get links to people and social engineering.

And so it was almost like you could see this thing coming down the horizon, and everybody else was busy.

Like back in 2000, you'd have a hard time convincing people like there was ever going to be spam.

So there was some tension there for a little while, but eventually I started working on spam.

And after a little while longer, again this 1 great VP of engineering named Urs, he invited me to his office 1 day.

And he was like, Matt, bearing in mind that you can't say no, how would you like to manage the web spam team?

And at the time I was just a lowly engineer.

Is this that you're managing tactic now for negotiations?

Because if they realize, they can be like, or I could go work somewhere else, or I could just say no.

But it actually worked out because you become less productive, but you enable so many more people to become productive.

And so really kind of worked on it for the rest of my time at Google, being a manager and trying to guide and help people to partner with them to figure out how to make the quality of the search results better.

Wheeler If you were thrown back into Google right now, how would you be thinking about deepfakes?

So the idea that you can create a video which has somebody, you know, falsely superimposing someone else's picture is a super hard problem.

Because like, in theory, okay, you could do content-aware hashes where you could say, this video is extremely similar to this other video except for these pixels.

But then people can change the histogram and add some noise and add a chyron or something.

In general with web spam, the philosophy was do as much as you can with an algorithm.

Catch the residual with manual spam people who are well trained and extremely good at being able to catch things, and then use that as the training data for the next wave of algorithms.

But fundamentally, when you're synthesizing new content as opposed to just republishing old content, that's a lot harder to detect.

Paul Matzkoff No, and I think the main thing is just to have policies.

Like if you have a good reason to believe that there's a deep fake, how do you handle that process?

Because I don't think you'll be able to completely automate the detection.

With de-platforming, de-monetizing, or monetizing.

So after that quite amazing tenure at Google, what motivated you to join USDS?

I was in Nebraska at the time with my wife because I was working part-time and and my wife had said why don't we do something fun?

And I was like, okay you get a pick what's next?

Yeah, and She's like, well, my family lives in Nebraska

So I'm like, alright, let's try that And after like 8 or 9 months, I was like, Nebraska is wonderful, the people are really nice, but I also want to try something new for a little while.

The Berkshire Hathaway meeting, you buy 1 share of Berkshire Hathaway, which you can buy for like 140 bucks, And then you can go to this meeting and watch them grill Warren Buffett for 8 hours.

And they also give you free honey bun treats and all the Dairy Queen stuff.

So that was a fun April, May kind of thing to do.

But it was interesting because I saw a ton of people that I really respect going to DC to try to make a difference in government.

And Mikey Dickerson, who was the first guy to run the US Digital Service, had come back to Google, he'd given a talk, and talked about the impact that you could have.

And so at that point, I was like, all right, something interesting is going on here.

And they needed somebody who could sort of steward the US digital service and make sure it would still be in good shape.

Because the person in front of me was an appointed official.

And so they needed a sort of interim acting administrator.

And so I was willing to fill in for that role.

Well, and to be clear, a bunch of people stepped up.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Matt Cutts on the US Digital Service and Working at Google for 17 Years