Google Inc. marked the one-year anniversary of the opening of its Santa Monica office last week with a decidedly L.A.-style event: a party and a filmmakers’ panel.

The search engine giant might seem to be reaching out to Hollywood and its content producers with events like that, but since it arrived on the Southland scene it has aggressively bought out and partnered with L.A. firms across a broad range of sectors.

“Google has consistently been interested in any company which has great engineers already within it,” said Google’s Engineering Director Thomas Williams. “We want to work with engineers who have developed technology.”

Google established its L.A. presence in 2003, when it bought Santa Monica’s Applied Semantics for roughly $40 million and 2.3 million shares of Google stock. It moved into the former ASI offices and established a product development office, which helped turn Applied Semantics’ Ad Sense into Google AdSense.

In July of 2004, one month before its initial public offering, Google bought Pasadena photo management software firm Picasa.

In March of 2005, Google bought San Diego’s Urchin Software, a provider of Web analytic software, which Google has since incorporated into its advertising and publishing products.

In January 2006, Google acquired Newport Beach’s dMarc Broadcasting for $1.1 million and contingent payments. Google integrated dMarc’s technology into its AdWords platform, significantly upping the value of the deal for dMarc.

The dMarc deal typified the Google approach in L.A. County, in which it has acquired a firm with a particular technology, along with its staff, and adapted it to a broader use.

“What we’re doing now is a continuation of start-ups that have been acquired by us,” said Williams, “but what has sort of evolved out of that is much different.”

At about the same time, Google moved into its current location at the corner of Fifth and Arizona streets in Santa Monica. Today, about 200 of the Mountain View, Calif.-based firm’s 10,000 employees are based there.

Its most recent purchase came last August, when it scooped up Santa Monica-based Neven Vision, an image recognition software firm.

Ken Ong is the other engineering director at the Santa Monica office and the operations manager is Michael Todd.