Didn’t realize Google had taken up a building/office in my backyard in Santa Monica…I saw it today while driving by. The address: 604, Arizona (corner of Arizona and 6th), with a Google flag flying over it. (It used to be the offices of Digital Evolution, a software company which changed its name to SOA last year)

And no, it is not a Hollywood-media efforts office, a la Yahoo’s media group. It will house an engineering development team. As this jobs page says: “Our Santa Monica engineering team is working on problems in a number of areas, including distributed systems, information retrieval, algorithms, UI, a variety of novel search features, and scalability issues related to dealing with huge amounts of data and a rapidly increasing user base.”

And this notice from the Santa Monica City Planning Division has some details on the kind of office and decor the building will have: funny how the planning division and Google couldn’t agree on the signage on the outside and inside the building, as well as the paint color on the outside. Ultimately, both of the parties decide on a color: gray. How un-Google…