Google grows: Its move means a bigger Pittsburgh presence

Google, the search engine company that's also a verb, has decided to make a bigger impression in Pittsburgh.

The firm, which has made its local home at the Collaborative Innovation Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Oakland for the past four years, is moving to the new Bakery Square development in East Liberty, where it will double the size of its offices to 40,000 square feet and add to the 100 employees already on staff here.

This is a marriage of old and new Pittsburgh worth celebrating.

The site of the Bakery Square development was for generations home to Nabisco, where the creation of cookies and crackers was a treat for customers and for anyone who lived within wafting distance of the plant. After Nabisco's demise, other companies tried but failed at the brick complex on Penn Avenue, and the site has been transformed for a hotel, residences and offices.

Now that the old has become new again it is ready for tenants, and news that Google will expand there is as welcome as the scent of baking butter and sugar.

Google, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., has grown in 11 years from a startup formed by two Stanford University graduate students to a giant whose market share for online search providers is a whopping 65 percent. About half of the office's current employees studied at schools in the region -- including Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, Penn State and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland -- and Google plans to maintain a similar ratio as it expands, helping to prevent brain drain and retain Pittsburgh's population of highly educated young people.

Delicious.