Mountain View, California — Internet search engine behemoth Google, which has slowly been ramping up its local efforts, has executed a subtle yet important shift in its management structure today, appointed one of the most visible faces of the company to oversee a potentially important source of growth. Marissa Mayer, Google Inc.’s vice president of search products and user experience and the company’s first female engineer, just got a big promotion — one that begins to match her reputation outside the company, is taking on a new role overseeing location and local services — markets the company is counting on to boost sales.
It is strange though, because most Google-watchers probably assumed Marissa had that kind of role with the company already. Google’s first female employee, photogenic, and geekily charismatic, Marissa often represented the company on TV and at conferences. She is always being mentioned as someone who is pushing the company toward acquisitions of smaller startups — like Twitter and Digg.
Apart from the promotion, she will also be joining Google’s operating committee of top decision-makers, the cabinet-of-sorts for the company’s ruling triumvirate of CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, which also includes about a dozen top executives. Ms. Mayer, 35, will be the youngest member.
“Marissa is moving over to an exciting new role covering geo/local, which is crucial to our users and the future of Google. Marissa has made an amazing contribution on search over the last decade, and we are excited about her input in this new area in the decade ahead,” Google said in a statement.
A source familiar with Google’s organizational structure informs that the promotion is an “internal honor,” that, given “Google’s distributed decision making framework, does not matter as much – substantively – as it sounds.”
Marissa Mayer, 35, will be the youngest member of Google’s operating committee of top decision-makers.
Mayer, will now head geo and local, while Udi Manber, a VP of engineering for web search, will take over the top search job. Her new day job is also the clearest indication yet that Google plans to take the local business market very seriously. The change comes as Google is moving to have a single executive oversee each of its principal product areas, rather than break them down by engineering and product.
On the geo/local aspect, Mayer will manage an increasing number of mobile and web efforts. Over the last month, Google has unveiled a new format for “hyperlocal” mobile ads that contains the distance between a mobile phone user and the business stated in an ad, and earlier this summer, the company added a new ad format to Google Maps. In addition to her responsibilities on local and location-aware products, Mayer will lead a team examining what is in store for the Internet far into the future, a subject matter Google–and few others–have yet to articulate.
“They basically took one of our strongest generals and put her on the front lines of another important front,” said the person briefed on Google’s decision. “Frankly in part it is because things in search are stable and in flux in local.”
There is clear indication that the social-media power brokers, such as, Facebook and Twitter will start hoarding their fair share of Internet advertising dollars as they grow, potentially shrinking the pie from which Google can depend on to fund driverless cars and wave-powered energy.
Mayer, the company’s 20th employee joined in 1999 as the company’s first female engineer, will manage an area that is crucial to users and Google itself, the Mountain View, California-based company said today in an e-mail.
Mayer is one of Google’s most notable executives, known for her technical prowess, meticulous attention to detail, and love of clothes and cupcakes. Mayer designed and developed the company’s search interface and expanded the site to more than 100 languages, according to Google. She has helped introduce more than 100 features and products on the site, including a faster Web search last month called Instant that gives users results as they type in queries.
The news of Ms. Mayer’s appointment to the operating committee was first reported by Business Insider, and news of her role overseeing local services was first reported by Bloomberg.