The former vice president of search product and user experience at Google has shifted focus to Location based services.
At Disrupt last month, Marisa Mayer took an interesting question from the audience:
Audience Q: I know you’re happy at Google but let’s assume you quit tonight and you leave what would you be interested in building, like, what industry, what would you do?
Marisa: I really love building consumer web products. And so, I think that… organizing information is a big passion of mine. I think that the fact that we get to help people find information and help to make decisions everyday something that’s really…And so, I think search is really interesting but I I think there’s also a lot of really interesting applications and I also think that in particular the mobile space, the location base space is something that’s really exciting right now.
Well, it turns out that she might have been planning a move because today Bloomberg reports that she’s taken a new role in charge of Location, Local Services.
Location is obviously the new frontier with armies of mobile phones being outfitted with local services. Google’s (GOOG) Android OS will no doubt be a huge part of Mayer’s new sphere of influence.
Mayer joined Google in 1999 as one of its first 20 employees and first female engineer and since then has worked on Search as well as a lot of other important projects including Orkut and Gmail, focusing on UI design. She’s known as the gatekeeper, the one who decides when a project is ready to go public.
Also of note: Google has chopped all but the top management off its corporate Bios page leaving Mayer and many others in the webcache s of the Internet.