Marissa Mayer Talks Google

Marissa Mayer is Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, a title that as is long as her role is important at Google. She isn’t as visible as the trio of Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin is, but has a lot of insights into the company’s strategy.

On Wednesday, Mayer sat down with San Francisco public radio station KQED to speak with the station’s Michael Krasny on his program Forum. The program is worth listening to and can be downloaded here, but a summary can also be found on the blog Google Operating System.

Among the highlights, as outlined by the blog,

Google could make $80-200 million/year by adding ads to Image Search, but people would use the product less.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin read some studies that showed it’s good to have around 25% of the technical workforce women to get a balanced environment and managed to maintain this proportion inside Google.

The median age for Google’s employees generally follows the average between Larry’s age and Sergey’s age.

Mayer also said that Google is serving up fewer sponsored-link ads to make them more relevant to users, that the company has no plans for a Microsoft-like or Apple-like operating systems for desktops, and that four fifths of calls to 800-GOOG-411 return satisfactory results.

That last number seems low, but it’s free so there probably aren’t a lot of complaints so far.