Being the vice president of search products at Google is not an easy job. Marissa Mayers, the search giant’s first woman engineer, does that and more. She also has the enviable job of spearheading the company’s user experience efforts and managing and training scores of product managers. In an exclusive meeting with BW’s Nelson Vinod Moses, she spoke about the Mountainview-based company’s new offerings. Excerpts:

Are there any cool ideas that you can talk about that you have come across recently?
There are places in the world that don’t have a great map data, and we have been thinking about how we can do it. Whether we can do it through automated means or using manpower, where we can hire a couple of hundred people and use aerial photography or maps and draw the roads. It is like developing the maps from scratch. We have seen some companies, particularly in China, do that. I thought we had to employ thousands to do that, but I was wrong — we could do that effectively with only a few hundred with good tools, systems and software and that would be a worthwhile investment.
We have seen this happen in China and it could work in India as well.

With Google diversifying in so many areas, do you ever fear, especially in the future, a peanut butter manifesto (a Yahoo! employee had sent an internal memo pointing out that the company’s slow growth was perhaps because it was spreading itself too thin) type of episode happening in Google?
For us, our business is search, ads and applications. Search built the business. Ads are what make search work from a monetisation standpoint, so that needs to be strong, and we are now leveraging the strong base that we have built to enter new mediums. But we’ve got to keep the core, that is, the search engine running, while we branch off and make more offerings.

What are you doing to ensure that you will be the leader in mobile search?
We believe that the search technology we have will fundamentally work on mobile. The question is one of user experience and technological requirements. I think we are ahead of the game in this area. However, we still need to consider geographic as well as demographic disparities across users.