Google Seattle Celebrates A Birthday And Opens A New Office

Oct 23, 2007 at 3:27pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Steve Yegge, an engineer at the Google Kirkland office, recently posted to the Google blog about the Kirkland office’s third birthday. He also announced the opening of an engineering office in Fremont.

Both locations are in the Seattle area — Fremont is just north of downtown and Kirkland is across the floating bridge on the east side (near another company you may have heard of called Microsoft). Yahoo also recently announced the opening of a new engineering office in the Seattle area. Theirs will be in Bellevue, which is also on the east side, near that little-known Redmond company. Both Yahoo and Google have downplayed Microsoft’s potentially recruiting potential (and Yahoo, being the third one in, is downplaying the possibility of recruiting from Google).

Yahoo Senior VP David Sobeski (previously at Microsoft) said to the Seattle PI, “We’re here to build a good presence of engineers. You know what, if Microsoft guys want to come and ask us questions, great. Google guys? Great. We’ll talk to everybody.” Earlier, Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president of engineering, told the PI that Google didn’t set up an office there in order to attract employees from Microsoft. (Although that office certainly has its share of ex-Microsofties.)

Fun fact: the picture in that PI article of the Google office includes me in the corner “brainstorming.” Sadly, the Buffy action figures on my old desk aren’t visible.

Steve’s blog post points out the many Google products to come out of the Kirkland office, and I can’t help but add that Sitemaps grew well beyond its roots into Webmaster Central thanks to the efforts of the Kirkland-based team.

Vanessa Fox ate lots of yummy cake as a Googler during the first and second birthdays of the Kirkland office and wishes them a very happy third.

Vanessa Fox is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. Called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle Business Monthly, she is an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search. She shares her perspective on how this impacts marketing and user experience at ninebyblue.com and provides authoritative search-friendly design patterns for developers at janeandrobot.com.

See more articles by Vanessa Fox >

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