Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 21, 2026

Anna Patterson

Anna Patterson is a software engineer and a contributor to search engines.

Last revised
Jun 21, 2026
Read time
≈ 2 min
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357 w
Citations
12
Source
Wikipedia ↗
Anna Patterson in front of Olin Library at her alma mater Washington University in St. Louis. source ↗

Anna Patterson is a software engineer and a contributor to search engines.1

Education

Patterson received her B.S. in Computer Science and another in Electrical Engineering from McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis2 and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign3 and was a Research Scientist at Stanford University in artificial intelligence working with John McCarthy on Phenomenal Data Mining and Carolyn Talcott on theorem provers.4

Career

As of 2017 she was Founder and Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures5 and Vice President of Engineering at Google. While she was working in Google's Android organization, Patterson was responsible for a division of Google Play including Books and Search, Recommendations and Infrastructure for scaling up Android from 40 million phones to over 800 million phones.6

She co-founded Cuil, a search engine (which she created after leaving Google in 2007)1 and wrote Recall.archive.org (part of the Wayback Machine), a history-based search engine out of the Internet Archive, which showed trends over time.

Awards and honors

Patterson was a winner of the 2016 ABIE Award.7 She also served on the board of Square Inc.8 She was previously a trustee at Harvey Mudd College9 and a trustee at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute10 and on the National Engineering Council at Washington University in St. Louis.11

References

References

  1. Tsotsis, Alexia. "Cuil Founder (And Former Googler) Anna Patterson Moves Back To Google". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
  2. "Anna Patterson". Archived from the original on 2015-02-03. Retrieved 2015-02-03.
  3. "Educational CyberPlayGround, Inc. - NetHappenings: Anna Patterson and Tom Costello launch cuil.com". Retrieved 2015-02-03.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
  4. "annap". formal.stanford.edu.
  5. Novet, Jordan (2017-07-11). "Google will invest in AI startups and send iters to help them out for up to a year". CNBC. Retrieved 2022-04-20.
  6. "Anna Patterson". makers.com.
  7. "Anna Patterson - Grace Hopper". 2016-08-05. Retrieved 2016-09-07.
  8. "Square Names Anna Patterson, Founder and Managing Partner of Google's Gradient Ventures, to Board of Directors".
  9. "2016–2017 Members of the Board | Harvey Mudd College". www.hmc.edu.
  10. "Anna Patterson". www.msri.org.
  11. "Anna Patterson". Archived from the original on 2015-02-03. Retrieved 2015-02-03.