Cutts started his career in search when working on his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In January 2000, Cutts joined Google as a software engineer. At 2007 PubCon, Cutts stated that his field of study was computer science; he then moved into the field of information retrieval and search engines after taking two 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, which he designed. 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.