It was a good day for the local tech scene yesterday as Internet giant Google announced plans to open a local office and a tech-focused economic development group reported an uptick in technology jobs in the latest fiscal year.

Amid food and fanfare, Google representatives joined officials from the state, Allegheny County and Carnegie Mellon University at noon to mark the Silicon Valley firm's plan to set up a research and development operation near CMU's campus.

Earlier in the morning, North Side-based Technology Collaborative, a public and privately funded tech advocacy group, reported that 50 information technology and robotics firms and organizations that are members added 304 jobs in the 12 months ended in June, the biggest increase in four years.

Google said its operation will be headed by Andrew Moore, 40, a CMU computer science and robotics professor who chairs a lab that tracks data patterns. An office site has yet to be chosen, though state officials had suggested it could end up in the Collaborative Innovation Center on CMU's campus.

The search engine giant decided to open a Pittsburgh outpost after approaching several CMU researchers and graduates who were interested in working for the company but were loathe to leave Pittsburgh, said Craig Nevill-Manning, the director of Google's New York City-based Engineering Center.

"The response [always] was, 'I really like living in Pittsburgh,' " he said. "If we were gonna hire these people, we'd have to open an office here."

But Dr. Nevill-Manning hedged when asked specifically how many jobs Google plans to fill in the local operation, though he indicated that as many as 100 could be hired over the next few years. Software engineers initially are being hired, according to the company's Web site.

Once Google settles on how many positions it plans to fill, it could be in line for a financial incentive package from the state and county, state Secretary of Community and Economic Development Dennis Yablonsky said.

Several details have yet to be ironed out, including which projects the local office will focus on. Dr. Moore noted that the projects will be "influenced by the people we hire."

Local work potentially could involve "Google Books," a database of digitized published work that Google recently launched, and "Google Q&A," a digital encyclopedia of sorts in which consumers can ask a question and have it answered using the Web's vast resources, said Dr. Nevill-Manning.

Google already counts 50 CMU alumni among its staff at offices around the world.

The university ranks among the country's top engineering and computer science schools, and has affiliations with Intel Corp. and Apple Computer Inc., both of which have offices in the Collaborative Innovation Center on the slopes of Panther Hollow off Forbes Avenue.

Google's announcement reflects another notch in the belt for local research institutions, particularly CMU and Pitt, that have been pushing to attract more investments in industries that promise to be future job generators.

That effort is being supported by the Technology Collaborative, formed with the past year's merger of the Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse and the Robotics Foundry.

The collaborative said its member firms created a net 304 local jobs in fiscal 2005, mostly from start-up firms. That's up from just 77 new jobs in the prior 12 months and 439 jobs that were lost in fiscal 2003, when the sting of the dot.com bust was still being felt.

Overall, the group said it has spawned some 609 jobs since 2000, mostly from the efforts of the former Digital Greenhouse, which ran education and business development programs for fledgling companies.

The Robotics Foundry, abetted by the federally funded National Center for Defense Robotics that researches and develops unmanned robotic vehicles for use by the armed services, linked Defense Department dollars with local firms on defense-related projects.

Armed with a budget of $10.5 million from public and private sources, the collaborative is collectively charged with growing the region's cluster of information technology and robotics-related companies. That has proven to be slow going until the past year, said Tech Collaborative Chief Executive Officer David Ruppersberger.

"People are hiring," he said, adding that he is predicting that the IT, medical device and robotics-aided assisted-living sectors will be "a real strong suit for this region over the next five years."