Putting a Bolder Face on Google

[DainBramaged]

IN late December, Marissa Mayer was vacationing in Africa when her boss, Jonathan Rosenberg, e-mailed her asking if she was leaving Google.

It wasn’t a routine query. As the gatekeeper of Google’s home page, and one of the company’s most ubiquitous and closely watched public faces, Ms. Mayer controls the look, feel and functionality of the Internet’s most heavily trafficked search engine. Rumors of her possible departure had lit up the blogosphere and offices across Silicon Valley.

None of it, she assured Mr. Rosenberg, was true. And Ms. Mayer, who is Google Employee No. 20 and the company’s first female engineer, still says she isn’t leaving; she says she has gone out of her way to inform Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as the chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, that she is staying put.

“It could not be further from the truth,” she says of gossip about her departure. “It made me realize that people don’t understand me.”

People may not understand Ms. Mayer, but as the “it girl” at one of the world’s hottest companies she is very hard to ignore. A popular guest on TV news programs and talk shows, a Google-booster often quoted in print, and a rapid-fire presence on San Francisco’s social scene, she is the rare executive who has become — at least in the sometimes cloistered world of computer geeks — a celebrity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01marissa.html?_r=1&8dpc