Marissa Mayer

The Google Queen

Marissa Mayer, 30, is the vice-president for search products and user experience for search engine Google.

She started working with Google in 1999 in the role as the technical lead for the user-interface team and is solely responsible for almost every user-interface change to Google's website. She has also worked on search classification, the Google web directory, image search and Google News.

Marissa has also had the title of product manager and was the first ever female engineer at Google.

What's her background?

Marissa grew up in Wausau, Wisconsin where she also went to school. She starred in the school debating team, captained the cheerleaders, practiced ballet for years and wanted to be a doctor.

After attending Stanford University in California she now holds a B.S. with honors in Symbolic Systems as well as an M.S. in Computer Science.

Prior to joining Google, Marissa worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland and SRI International in Menlo Park, California.

When being offered the job at Google she turned down a job offer of teaching computer science. She has since taught introductory computer programming classes at Stanford.

Future

Marissa, who has had patents filed on her work in artificial intelligence, speculates that in the future, Google may be accessed through a range of other media. For examples, people could call from a phone or car and hear search results read to them.

But the nearest goal and focus lies with voice, sound, image and video search which Marissa is at the forefront of, developing new ideas to provide users of even more high-quality and more relevant answers in Google.