More Courage!

Marissa Mayer, Google Inc.'s vice president of search products, is taking a new role overseeing location and local services - markets that are strategically crucial to boost the companies sales, according to Bloomberg.

In 2005, she was the first winner of the Aenne Burda Award which is meant to honour exceptional women and thus encourage and inspire other women to believe in what they are doing and dare to be successful. She joined Google as the company's first female engineer. According to sources that prefer to remain anonymous the long-term DLD friend will also join Google's elite operating committee.

"Marissa has made an amazing contribution on search over the last decade, and we're excited about her input in this new area in the decade ahead," the company said.

Google is putting more focus on local businesses and location services as it looks for areas of growth outside traditional Internet searches. The effort may help the company get more advertising from neighborhood stores and restaurants. More than 90 percent of the company's revenue comes from online ads.

Marissa 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. Google rose $2.55 to $541.39 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have dropped 13 percent this year.

For more background information read the Bloomberg article here and watch Marissa at the DLD 2009 panel "Women Power" below. Also, find her on the DLD panels "Cloud Computing" (2009), "Exploding Media" (2008), "The Billion Dollar Bubble" (2007), and "The Next Big Thing" (2006).