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Google Inc. is coming to Pittsburgh -- planning to tap the expertise available at Carnegie Mellon University to open a software engineering office that could create as many as 100 high-paying jobs.

That was one piece of a double-dip of good news for the technology sector of Western Pennsylvania's economy announced Thursday.

Separately, the Technology Collaborative, an organization working to build jobs in digital technology and robotics, said its members added 304 net new jobs to the region's economy in the last fiscal year, the best job creation performance in those sectors in the last four years.

"Pittsburgh is feeling lucky today," said CMU President Jared L. Cohen in announcing Google's decision to locate a research and development office in the region, at a news conference at the university's Rangos Hall.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, whose Google.com search engine is one of the five most popular sites on the Internet, is tapping Andrew W. Moore, a 12-year veteran CMU professor, with expertise in computer science and robotics, to head the local office.

Plans are to select a site, probably on or near CMU's Oakland campus, early next year for the office, said Craig Neville-Manning, director of the New York Google Engineering Center in Manhattan.

"Our mission is to organize a lot of information and make it universally accessible and useful," he said.

The Pittsburgh office will be hiring people who have the talent to come up with creative new ways to make that happen, working at creating a variety of search tools.

Officials said as many as 50 CMU alumni already work at Google offices worldwide, on such projects as its Google Local product, which enables users to find such geographic information as an address of a nearby Starbuck's coffee shop.

CMU researchers also have joined forces with the company on several initiatives, including Global Connection, a software system that can overlay images onto Google Earth, the company's Earth imaging browser.

At an earlier news conference yesterday, officials of the Technology Collaborative said its members added 320 jobs in the 2005 fiscal year, and lost only 16 positions, bringing the net gain in employment in digital technology and robotics to 304.

"The job creation in 2005 is indicative of a growing cluster of digital and robotics companies in the region," said David Ruppersberger, president and CEO of the organization, created in January with the merger of the state-funded Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse and the Robotics Foundry.

Last year, the region added a total of 77 net jobs in those sectors, but in 2003, it experienced a net loss of 439 jobs.

He said the 2005 data also is significant because the average annual wage in the two sectors is $70,000.

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