"Scarcity brings clarity," says Marissa Mayer, the blonde cyborg who runs Google's search engine, in a BusinessWeek interview. She makes fun of Dilbert-style managers — but in reality, she shows how she's turned into one.

It's Silicon Valley's fairytale romance: Girly-girl nerd worth hundreds of millions meets fellow with a job who looks good in a tux. And now Marissa Mayer and Zack Bogue are getting married, a tipster says.

Want to know what worry-prone consumers are looking for online? Marissa Mayer, the search engine's prettiest vice president, went on Today to reveal its top searches for 2008.

A tipster tells us that Google VP Marissa Mayer, who owns a penthouse apartment in San Francisco's Four Seasons, recently berated the staff there about how long it's taken to paint the lobby of the residents' entrance at the hotel-condominium complex, and stormed off before they could apologize. Oh, how nouveau riche, arriviste, tacky — is that what you're thinking? Think again! As bad as one might feel for the Four Seasons workers, one has to think Mayer's imperiousness has its plusses — at least for Google's shareholders.As vice president for search products and user experience, she's guarded against clutter on Google's homepage. And Google continues to seize market share from rivals who can't grasp the obvious lessons of Mayer's perfectionism. Memo to Marissa: We actually like you better when you're being bossy, not ostentatiously girlish. More tirades, fewer cupcakes, please.

Zack Bogue, the well-dressed boy toy of Googler Marissa Mayer, always looks good in black. But the surprise in SFluxe's coverage of a recent masked ball is that Mayer does, too. Smart of her to adopt a more subdued palette in these dark economic times. Can you think of a better caption for the photo? Leave it in the comments. The best one will become the post's new headline. Friday's winner: Ted Dziuba, for "A final salute to the good times." (Photo by Drew Altizer via SFluxe)

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of things that actually make money, sat down for a filmed power breakfast with NBC's Today show. Aside from a fib at the start — that she doesn't think of herself as a female Googler, when that's how she's listed in her corporate bio, and how she introduced herself, quite recently, to ABC News, It's a good performance — no nervous tics, no creepy laughs captured on camera. But it's missing something.Mayer makes a convincing argument, at least on the surface, that gender-neutral policies are the best way to advance women's careers. It would have been more impressive if she'd talked honestly about the very real discrimination women — or at least women who aren't Marissa Mayer, ex-girlfriend of cofounder Larry Page — face at Google; how unevenly those policies are enforced by poorly trained managers; and how Google's culture shunts many women into classicly female roles like sales and operations.

"Nice to see Marissa living large in a sharp economic downturn," snarks a tipster about the latest society outing of Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president in charge of the stuff people actually use, at the opening of Tory Burch's clothing boutique on Union Square's Maiden Lane. His anti-Marissa rant continues:

If you don't believe Google should buy a few 30-second TV spots to hawk its Chrome browser, watch Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience try to explain Chrome to the semitechnical viewers at CNBC. The whole thing falls apart into a meandering talk about faster JavaScript rendering, overlaid with a chart of Google's waffling stock price — the real reason Mayer is on CNBC. I doubt investors changed their GOOG valuations based on Mayer's promise that in the future, crashing one tab in their browser won't take down the whole thing.

When a history of the decline and fall of Wilson Sonsini, Silicon Valley's preeminent law firm, is written, this will surely deserve a paragraph: The lawyers there are now defending cupcakes. Sprinkles Cupcakes, the Los Angeles bakery made notable by HBO's Entourage, is seeking to defend its trademarked dot patterns against imitators; the concentric circles denote flavors. (Shown here: a red velvet cupcake.) It is, I suppose, a question of intellectual property. And a client is a client. But taking on this case just illustrates how far Wilson Sonsini has fallen since the '90s, when IPO fees fattened its partners' wallets, and before it got wrapped up in stock-options scandals. The silver icing: This may lead to work representing Google executive Marissa Mayer, should an interloper ever trespass on the ideas contained in her spreadsheet of cupcake recipes.

A group of ultrarich San Francisco socialites, each with a carbon footprint the size of a small African country, gathered at the home of Larry Ellison's wife Melanie Ellison. The good cause: to promote author Sloan Barnett's book Everything Goes with Green — which just happens to suggest everyone buy her husband Roger Barnett's Shaklee "green" cleaning products. But the conflict of interest wasn't nearly as chatworthy as the conflict of couture!Quelle horreur: Both Barnett and Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president for cupcake-recipe spreadsheets, wore the same blue Oscar de la Renta dress with a green-leaf pattern along the hem! Also, it seems that arm-candy real-estate manager Zack Bogue is trying to tear Valleywag editor Owen Thomas's affections away from stubblicious Flickr developer Cal Henderson by sporting some ursine facial fur. Though my guess is he was just too lazy to shave — that the top button and not the middle button is buttoned on his pinstriped jacket says "sloppy." (Photos by Drew Altizer)

Wearing a green ballgown and patent leather belt from designer Catherine Martin and plenty of diamonds, Google cupcake princess Marissa Mayer mingled with the local society set at the San Francisco Symphony opening night gala. But the big news isn't that Martin clearly chose the green print from the upholstery section at the fabric store, but that Mayer's venture capitalist boytoy Zack Bogue was nowhere to be seen in any pictures. Could the pair be on the outs? Of course, where Mayer goes, A-list Google gay Orkut Büyükkökten and his partner Derek Holbrook are sure to follow. The pair wore white and silver tuxes, respectively — however, with no right hands visible in their photo, we can't tell if the betrothed couple have officially tied the knot yet. Update: Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Don Draper, the Chronicle has pics of Bogue and Mayer arm-in-arm. Looks like Bogue took our advice and dressed it up with a pocket square.(Photo by Drew Altizer via SFLuxe)

In an epic post, Google VP Marissa Mayer does some work to earn her hundreds of millions of dollars in equity by clarifying statements made earlier in a Los Angeles Times interview — Google has solved 90 percent of the search equation in the first ten years, but the remaining ten percent will take nine times as much effort. The post is full of the sort of details that flit about in Mayer's mind and amongst her social circle. Most telling? She didn't know the word "goy," a word from Hebrew for gentiles or non-Jews. Granted, I doubt she ran into many Hebrew or Yiddish speakers growing up in Wausau, Wis. or shopping at the JC Penney in Yankton, S.D. on Saturday. (Photo by Andrew Mager)

Google's cupcake princess Marissa Mayer celebrating the company's tenth anniversary at the TechCrunch50 party — giving us all a taste of how they celebrate young Googler birthdays at the Kinderplex. Yesterday's winner: "You know little boy, I have much I can teach you" by Duncan. (Photo by Andrew Mager)

At a conference in San Francisco meant for startups, Google search-and-cupcake czar Marissa Mayer is currently live-demoing Google's latest launch, a news archive of scanned newspaper stories that goes back decades. The archive's scope of how many newspapers, over how many decades, isn't clear from Mayer's presentation or Google's blog post. Mayer says the project uses Google's book-scanning tech, adapted for newsprint archives.

Not aware that there will be any cutbacks in perks at Google, Marissa Mayer admitted to the economic justification for the Mountain View company's famous cafeterias was to wring every possible drop of productivity from salaried employees by keeping them near campus. However wage slaves at the Googleplex, like the undocumented workers at those cafeterias employed by subcontractors, probably won't be seeing pay or working conditions improving any time soon.

The new "followers" feature on Google's Blogger, which turns the blogging service into a quasi-social network, may strike some as too little, too late — a me-too move following WordPress and Movable Type's adddition of social elements. But it didn't have to happen. Blogger had a full-fledged social network in the works years ago, called Profiles — and it was quashed by Marissa Mayer in favor of Orkut. Why? Mayer's own social network.

An eagle-eyed reader spotted a shot of what looked to them like a giant cupcake building in downtown San Francisco, and immediately Google's cupcake princess Marissa Mayer came to mind. Credit-card giant Visa has recently started running an ad with lots of everyday-but-oversized objects populating urban areas (we've searched in vain on YouTube and among sites that cater to ad agencies for the full video). Based on the street furniture, I'd say it's not San Francisco. But is the connection so far-fetched?Mayer is well known both for her love of cupcakes and the the "pink power" girliness of Sex and The City. I could see a commissioned installation in the trite, childish style of international art superstars Jeff Koons or Claes Oldenburg. San Francisco still doesn't have a Frank Gehry, and frankly, a giant cupcake wouldn't be half as ugly as the Experience Music Project building in Seattle sponsored by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Could be high time for Mayer, the newest member of SFMOMA's board, to make a dent on the skyline. Maybe a new storefront location for the pastry-sculpting business Mayer owns with Shinmin Li, I Dream of Cake?

Click to viewBuried in Kara Swisher's piece about EQAL, the new "social entertainment company" from Lonelygirl15 creators Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, is the dilly that one of the previously unnamed investors providing $5 million in funding is none other than Google's cupcake princess, Marissa Mayer. What's the next project from the YouTubepreneurs made good? Well, it's going to be kind of like lonelygirl15, except with a shot of social-network frosting. [BoomTown]

SFLuxe has photo proof that yes, that was Google cupcake princess Marissa Mayer at the years-delayed opening of Prada's San Francisco store on Maiden Lane in Union Square. Next to her in the "I heart Prada" tee is Orkut Büyükkökten, the totally gay Googler who unintentionally brought social networking to millions of Brazilians. Hey, don't forget to update Google Maps, which still points to Prada's temporary store on Geary. Prada, known for its sexy, well-built women's shoes, also makes men's footwear and a line of downtown-chic clothing for abnormally skinny people of all genders. I'll be down the street at Macy's.(Photo by Damion Matthews)

The Wall Street Journal's Pepper ... & Salt has never been particularly cutting-edge. But a recent cartoon reads like a time capsule: An entrepreneur at startup WotsHot.com says, "Here's our timetable: launch, grow rapidly, be bought by Google." How quaint! During the lean years earlier in the decade, when Google was the only show in town, startups may have dreamt of getting bought by Google. But more recently, getting bought by Google has proven a nightmare, albeit a lucrative one. The oldtimers at YouTube are resting and vesting, watching the clocks tick. JotSpot's wiki product languished for a year before getting relaunched in barely functional form. Measure Map, a Web-traffic analysis startup, was similarly buried.And who can blame them? Google coddles engineers, but it also suffocates them. With the free food, massages, and laundry come a quirky set of in-house technologies and an increasingly bureaucratic, insider-driven culture. A favored clique of Google-IPO lottery winners rule over what's supposed to be a meritocracy. Marissa Mayer, Larry Page's ex-girlfriend, rules with an iron fist over what features see the light of day in Google's all-important search engine. Google used to pitch startups on the notion of selling to them rather than give a stake to VCs; Chris Sacca, a former Googler expert in peddling empty promises, led this effort. Not surprising that it didn't work out. Google is now getting into the VC business itself — a tacit acknowledgement that it is no longer an attractive destination for startup founders. As an investor, Google gets a look at new technologies and talents. Entrepreneurs get to keep their freedom. Funny, freedom is exactly what Google used to promise the companies it acquired — and what it no longer has to offer. (Cartoon by Pepper & Salt/WSJ)