Marissa Mayer controls the look, feel and functionality of the home page of the Internet’s most heavily trafficked search engine, says the New York Times.

She joined Google after graduating with a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford in 1999, when the company was a shoestring start-up — and Mayer took on the job of figuring out how the home page should work.

She started out writing code and overseeing small teams of engineers, carving out a niche for herself by developing and designing Google’s search offerings.

Mayer also had something that many of her peers did not during Google’s early days: a keen sense of style and design. 

According to the article, which is this week's Link : “She adored bold blocks of color against a white background . . . It used to be people would come over to my apartment and say, ‘Does your apartment look like Google or does Google look like your apartment?’ ”