Welcome to 2009: Google's Marissa Mayer to call it quits?

Marissa Mayer, one of Google's oldest employees (that is, in years of service), may be considering a departure to what Gawker thinks is a more suiting position at Stanford. Currently, she works at Google as Vice President of Search Product and User Experience -- meaning she's pretty much in charge of making users happy, and therefore making Google successful.

Personally, I don't think this rumor is going to come to fruition any time soon. This new information apparently originated at Google's Christmas party when "top Googler's" were overheard talking about it -- perhaps they were discussing one of Alex Chitu's predictions for the coming year?

Gawker talks about how wealthy she is, saying she's easily worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and that her career is basically a dead end since the turnover rate of executive at Google is quite low. Marissa leaving is definitely a possibility, but I don't think 2009 will be the year for it. Even if she doesn't leave, I don't think her heart is in her work like it used to be -- just take a look at SearchWiki.

SearchWiki is that new feature on search result pages that allows you to move results to the top of the list, or remove them altogether. I clicked on one of those arrows once to see how it worked, but it's just not something I'm ever going to use in a real-life scenario. This new "feature" simply gets in the way, and there is no way to disable it without installing a third party script.

What do you think is in store for Marissa in 2009?