Mayer, who runs Google's core search business, is the best known Google executive outside the search engine's CEO, Eric Schmidt, and its billionaire founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And she's proven far more willing to pose for magazine covers and appear on morning news shows, making her the company's public face.

But she seems surprised that with such publicity comes criticism. According to Mayer, the reason why she draws negative press is because of sexism and stereotypes:

I think it's very comforting for people to put me in a box. ‘Oh, she's a fluffy girlie girl who likes clothes and cupcakes. Oh, but wait, she is spending her weekends doing hardware electronics.'

It's true that San Francisco, the last mainstream publication to profile her, focused on her most girly habits. But that has nothing to do with why so many rank-and-file Googlers outside the company's cloistered management despise Mayer.

To grasp that, it helps to understand Google's grandiose self-image: The company's spoiled engineers are led to believe they work in the most perfect meritocracy of ideas that the world has ever seen, motivated by the betterment of mankind through technology. At Google, the theory goes, who you are and who you know doesn't matter. It's only your ideas that count.

And yet, as the Times profile reveals, the real source of her power is the ability to manipulate Schmidt, Page, and Brin:

Given her longstanding relationship with Google's founders and Mr. Schmidt, she has become something of a sounding board for other managers, a number of whom routinely gravitate to her office.

At the end of a recent day, she met with two senior executives, Joe Kraus and Sundar Pichai, to discuss the company's social networking projects. Many executives at Google believe that social networking is important to its future. Ms. Mayer was meeting with Mr. Kraus and Mr. Pichai to help them prepare for a meeting the next day with Mr. Schmidt, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page to discuss how the company could leverage information-sharing among Google's many services.

"It's important you pregame Eric or it will be a disaster," Mr. Pichai tells Ms. Mayer about the pending meeting, asking her to seek Mr. Schmidt's support on their behalf.

"I know, I know," she responds. "I will call him or write an e-mail. I want them to see how complicated this will be."

Ms. Mayer e-mails Mr. Schmidt that evening. At the meeting the next day, Mr. Pichai's and Mr. Kraus's ideas are approved

The Times article does not mention a key reason why Mayer has such influence: Early in the company's history, she dated Page. (He is now married, and Mayer is engaged to Zack Bogue, a real-estate investment manager and lawyer.)

In dictating the appearance of Google's Web pages, Mayer freely admits she makes subjective decisions. In more than a decade on the job, she has not yet codified her design instinct into a written style guide. Instead, Mayer's whims, which managers under her must make a study of, are what rule.

Mayer may be talented. But her personal ties to Google's top management and her exerscise of arbitrary power are a betrayal of Google's supposedly meritocratic values — a betrayal obviously tolerated at the very top of the company. That, and not her spending time putting cupcake recipes in spreadsheets, is what exasperates her fellow Googlers.

That, and her perfectionist streak. Look at how Mayer dismisses a potential hire over a single bad grade:

One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. "That's troubling to me," Ms. Mayer says. "Good students are good at all things."

Another candidate looked promising with a quarterly rating from a supervisor of 3.5, out of 4, which meant she had exceeded her manager's expectations. Ms. Mayer is suspicious, however, because her rating hasn't changed in several quarters.

"She is looking for a way out," Ms. Mayer says.

Mayer complains that the media has not examined her life deeply:

Besides, Ms. Mayer says, there are some things that she hasn't previously revealed about herself and that the media have overlooked. Like her self-described athletic prowess.

"It hasn't shown up anywhere that I am really physically active," she says. "I ran the San Francisco half marathon this year. I did the Portland marathon. I went skiing just yesterday. I'm going to do the Birkebeiner, which is North America's longest cross-country ski race. That just shows you how much there are gaps."

Ah yes, the Portland Marathon, in which Mayer placed 7,074th out of 7,862 contestants. Or the Birkebeiner ski race, in which she placed dead last in the women's competition. Good students are good at all things.

Did she really mean to invite media scrutiny of her athletic career? What's really telling about it: In the handful of times where Mayer has competed on her own, without the backing of a billionaire ex-boyfriend and a pliant boss, she has proven to be an outright failure.

At the beginning of the piece, Mayer once again denies rumors of her impending departure from Google — rumors which Valleywag first reported. Perhaps she has realized that without Google, she's nothing. Can you blame her for clinging to her job?

(Photo via RacePhotos.net)

We'd heard Mayer's boyfriend, real-estate manager Zack Bogue, surprised Mayer in December by flying to Paris and proposing to her. But this is the first glimpse we've gotten of the engagement ring he put on her finger. An ex-Googler who saw it over the holidays said it was "not grotesque at all" — a blessing, considering that Mayer's quirky personal style, funded by hundreds of millions of dollars in Google shares, runs towards the nouveau gauche. Surely someone has gotten close to Mayer with a macro lens. If you've got a clear photo of Mayer's ring, care to send it in?

Update: Here's a closeup of the ring, via Eirik Solheim's Flickr:

Update: And another one, via J. Scriba's DLDscape art project:

Top Googlers, overheard at a holiday party, chattered about Mayer's departure as a matter of if, not when. And in some ways, it's surprising she's stayed as long as she has.

First of all, she's wealthy. That "19th employee" bit is code, within Silicon Valley, for "rich"; the earlier an employee joins a startup which succeeds, the more money they make. With Google, which is still worth $96 billion after its stock tumble, that translates into hundreds of millions of dollars for Mayer, who owns a penthouse apartment in San Francisco's Four Seasons, another home in outrageously pricey Palo Alto, and a large (if questionably tasteful) art collection, including original glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly. A couture hound, she once paid $60,000 for a lunch with Oscar de la Renta, and she owns part of I Dream of Cake, a "cake gallery" in North Beach, as a way of indulging her pastry fetish.

So she's already made her money. And her career? Mayer, who joined Google in 1999 straight out of Stanford's graduate computer-science department, rose quickly through the ranks. A stint dating Google cofounder Larry Page surely didn't hurt her chances, but she won promotions first to director and then to vice president mostly by dint of a schedule of robotic overwork and an obsession with keeping the search engine's homepage sparse and free of clutter. Her looks — blonde, Midwestern, unusually attractive for Silicon Valley — helped her win magazine covers. And she won fans among Google's tight-knit top management, even as underlings groaned about her scattered, arbitrary management style.

But the lack of turnover in Google's excuive ranks has hurt her chances of rising farther. Jonathan Rosenberg, a six-year veteran of Google who's close to its founders and a regular on its quarterly earnings calls with Wall Street analysts, would be hard to displace. While Mayer photographs well, she's an awkward public speaker — that awful, offputting giggle! And really, she already runs the world's most successful search engine, which continues to steal share from well-funded rivals. What else could she do at Google to match that?

It's a good time to leave: Mayer just got engaged to Zack Bogue, a property manager and lawyer who, importantly, looks good on his fiancée's arm at the San Francisco society events she favors. She'll no doubt be courted by venture capitalists, too, to run companies. But if I had to bet, I'd put my money on her returning to Stanford, where she now teaches computer-science classes in her spare time. Academia is the environment most like the comforting cocoon of Google, where she's spent her entire working life. From a professor, a nerdy laugh is almost expected.

Talk at the Googleplex has it that Bogue, a real-estate investment manager, flew to Paris to surprise Mayer with a marriage proposal. (Mayer was in France to speak at LeWeb, a tech conference frequented by tech-conference-goers.) Valleywag first heard about Bogue and Mayer's romance in January.

Is she marrying down? No question. Mayer was employee no. 20 at Google, and she once dated Google cofounder Larry Page. Her IPO riches alone make her Valley royalty. Bogue buys and manages apartments for rich people, a business he somewhat brazenly dubs "private equity." His business is called "Montara Capital Partners," which makes him sound like a venture capitalist. He is also a lawyer, sort of, which is definitely several rungs down Silicon Valley's social ladder. When he attends elite conferences like TED, he's there as Mayer's plus-one. But come on: Mayer found a single straight man in San Francisco. Her accomplishment is not to be discounted.

What we're dying to know: Which overexposed couturier will Mayer, who once paid $60,000 for a lunch with Oscar de la Renta, pick to design her wedding dress? We already know where she's getting the wedding cake: I Dream of Cake, a San Francisco "cake gallery" in which Mayer has personally invested. As for Bogue, if he's wearing anything other than a tux, the black-and-white uniform in which he squires Mayer to San Francisco society events, we'll be disappointed.

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)

What would have happened had Rachel Marsden was left with more than just a few articles of clothing after those steamy days with Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales? Nothing good.

I have to admit, out of all the babies, Marissa Mayer and Zack Bogue's faux-offspring is the least horrifically ugly.

"IT Girl" Julia Allison is ostensibly dating Iminlikewithyou founder Charles Forman. But with that lack of resemblance, could Allison be covering for another lover?

Because Forman and Tumblr founder David Karp are very, very close. Looks like Allison is just the beard and Karp is the Forman baby's daddy.

I have to admit, the black-and-white dress with fringed hem she wore was downright tasteful! But Bogue, handsome as he may be, could dandy up just a bit — the dark suit, white shirt and light blue tie is pretty conservative, and looks like something well-gelled God-mayor Gavin Newsom wears nearly daily. I wouldn't recommend Bogue going over the top à la Mayer's fey friend Orkut Buyukkokten, but would it kill him to wear a pocket square to a fashion show? (Photos by Drew Altizer)

You know Orkut Buyukkokten, don't you? Yes, he's that Orkut — the Googler behind the favorite website of Brazilian pederasts, neo-Nazis and Indian teenagers. And he's fabulous in sheen.

Here's Mayer with business partner Shinmin Li, proprietor of I Dream of Cake, the North Beach pastry salon. "Cupcakes anyone?" SFLuxe ignorantly asks. Anyone who's anyone knows that Mayer calls the business "cake-sculpting."

Mayer's mother, too, is attending. And then count the number of Bezoses whose first name isn't "Jeff" on the list. That's just for starters. Surely one of these people could have been bumped to make room for TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who is distraught over his exclusion.

Because we've published the list, you can judge for yourself Anderson's skills at assembling a conference crowd. What troubling examples of nepotism can you find?

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I like the dress. I think her hair throws it off so I would do it differently but she looks good. A man in a tux is always a nice accessory.

I'll save you the trouble of Googling him. Here's Zack on Facebook (he and Mayer are friends, though her profile still says she's "single") and LinkedIn. (Photo (with helpful, identifying, caption!) of Marissa and Zack by Drew Altizer visa SFluxe)