Marissa Mayer, the first female engineer at Google and current VP of Location and Local Services, on what we can do to get more women in tech:

“The number one most important thing we can do to increase the number of women in tech is to show a multiplicity of different role models… [a set stereotype] really hurts people’s understanding and ability to identify with the role and say, ‘Yes, this is something I can be in and want to be in.’”

Dear Santa, your friend Marissa Mayer, leading lady at Google, would love to get some really boring stuff for Christmas. A thing that gives you 4G on the go! A thermostat! Snoozefest galore!

I’m sure there are less flash-bang ways of announcing a major corporate acquisition than a blog post, but I’m not sure I can think of one at the moment. But that’s Google’s style, so we’ll go with it.

Marissa Mayer, the vice president of maps and location services at Google (who, by the way, Forbes recently decided was more powerful than the Queen of England), announced today that Google was buying Zagat for an as-of-yet-unknown amount. And her Official Google Blog post on the subject gave one the sense that she was excited about the move for, perhaps, some personal reasons.

Google VP Marissa Mayer often acts as a public face for the company. But once, while working on the back-end side, the Goog’s lady in shining armor “broke the Internet,” she told Newsweek. Mayer admits she and her team once accidentally added one extra slash (as in, a “/”) to the thousands and thousands of lines of code that handle Google search, resulting in “every page on the Internet popping up with a big red warning: THIS SITE MAY HARM YOUR COMPUTER. You couldn’t access anything on Google. It was as if the Internet was broken.”

As VP of Search at the time, Mayer recalls things going absolutely haywire on a Saturday morning in 2009 upon realizing the fiasco while in a Minneapolis hotel room. Tens of millions of users couldn’t access Google for some time, leading them to temporarily use…gasp…Yahoo! Mayer got stuff under control though – she was in communication with co-workers via cell phone, the hotel landline, video chat, and through 8 instant messenger windows. They recognized the problem within 10 minutes, and fixed the whole thing in an hour. And that is how you become a top executive at Google.