Doug Cutting has been working in the field of information retrieval for more than a decade.

Beginning in 1988, he spent five years at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) developing novel approaches to information access. These included a high-performance retrieval engine, several innovative search paradigms, advanced linguistic analysis methods, and high-quality text summarization algorithms. This work resulted in seven publications and six issued patents. Some of these technologies are now marketed by Inxight.

In 1993 he moved to Apple's Advanced Technserology Group (ATG). There he developed a state-of-the-art retrieval engine code-named V-Twin. This engine is a part of Apple's latest operating system release, System 8.5, whose Sherlock feature uses V-Twin to maintain a full-text index of all files on the hard disk.

In April of 1996, Doug left Apple and joined Excite where he took over development of the core search technology. Doug is currently a Senior Architect on Excite@Home's core technology strategy & development team.