Google Base database provided by Google into which any user can add almost any type of content, such as text, images, and structured information in formats such as XML, PDF, Excel, RTF, or WordPerfect. As of September 2010, the product has since been promoted to Google Merchant Center. If Google finds it relevant, submitted content may appear on its shopping search engine, Google Maps or even the web search. The piece of content can then be labeled with attributes like the ingredients for a recipe or the camera model for stock photography. Because information about the service was leaked before public release, it generated much interest in the information technology community prior to release. Google subsequently responded on their blog with an official statement:

A major component of Google Base is acting like a online classified ads service, such as Craigslist. However it has also been used for such items as protein structures, current events, real estate, recipes, people profiles, and more.

Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality team in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues.

Cutts started his career in search when working on his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. According to quotation in a personal interview with an operator of another website, Matt got his Bachelor's degree at the University of Kentucky and Master's degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In the interview he was quoted his field of study was computer graphics and movement tracking, then moved into the field of information retrieval, and search engines after taking two required outside classes from the university's Information and Library Science department.

Before working at the Search Quality group at Google, Cutts worked at the ads engineering group and SafeSearch, Google's family filter.^{[citation needed]} There he earned the nickname "porn cookie guy" by giving his wife's homemade cookies to any Googler who provided an example of unwanted pornography in the search results.