“It used to be people would come over to my apartment and say,‘Does your apartment look like Google or does Google look like your apartment?’”


By LAURA M.HOLSON


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

As the gatekeeper of Google’s home page and one of the company’s most 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 spread to the blogosphere and offices across Silicon Valley.

None of it, she assured Mr.Rosenberg, was true. And Ms.Mayer, who is Google Employee Number 20 and the company’s first female engineer, still says she isn’t leaving.

“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 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 presence on San Francisco’s social scene, she is the rare executive who has become a celebrity.

She has invited attention - and in some cases, derision - in the last year for such actions as creating spreadsheets to find the perfect cupcake recipe, attending lavish ballet, art and fashion galas, paying $60,000 at a charity auction to have lunch with Oscar de la Renta, and hosting parties at her $5 million penthouse apartment atop the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco.

“I refuse to be stereotyped,”she says.“I think it’s very comforting for people to put me in a box.‘Oh, she’s a fluffy girlie girl who likes clothes and cupcakes. Oh, but wait, she is spending her weekends doing hardware electronics.’”

Yet, despite whatever frivolity might attach itself to her, Ms.Mayer, 33, plays a pivotal, serious role at Google. Almost every new feature or design, from the wording on a Google page to the color of a Google toolbar, must pass muster with her.

An engineer at heart, she had something that many of her peers did not during Google’s early days: a keen sense of style and design. She adored bold blocks of color against a white background.

Google’s home page - spartan white embroidered with splashes of blue, red, yellow and green - mirrors her penthouse apartment.

“It used to be people would come over to my apartment and say,‘Does your apartment look like Google or does Google look like your apartment?’”she says.“I can’t articulate it anymore. I really love color.”

Since joining Google, Ms.Mayer has introduced more than 100 products and features, many of which have thrived: Google News, Gmail and Image Search, for example.

In meetings, Ms.Mayer gives guidelines to managers for various Google features and products. The guidelines are devised, she said, from myriad internal experiments to gauge users’preferences. Avoid first- and second-person pronouns. Always write“Google”instead of“we.”Don’t switch tenses. And steer clear of italics because they are hard to read on a computer screen.

She sighs when asked if she is bored with giving the same directions over and over. She and a team of designers are creating a style guide, she says, so she can quit repeating herself.

“Once I let up,”she says,“then something gets by. If we use the word‘we,’then users think we are picking their words for them. You have to try and make words less human and more a piece of the machinery.”