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Yahoo have swooped in on former Google executive Marissa Mayer to
lead Yahoo back to be among the elite of technology companies.
Despite having a global audience of 700 million monthly users,
Yahoo
has been unable to bring in more ad-revenue and grow its business.
Although the company has cycled through 5 CEOs in the last 6 years
itself, Yahoo believes it has found the ideal candidate in Ms
Mayer,
who was the first female engineer to be employed by Google.
The company will hope she will be able to lead Yahoo back to the
heights it peaked in the 90's, when it was one of the first search
engines available on the web. However, with the rise and Google
and
Facebook in the online advertising market, Yahoo has seen ceded a
great deal of the market to them.
Mayer has said in an interview that she plans to “deliver
great
end-user experiences” and give the user “something valuable and
delightful”. Mayer was one of the pioneers of the now ubiquitous
Google search engine, and is also responsible for the simple
aesthetic feel of the Google home page.
It will be interesting to see if she brings the attention back to
the
search engine in Yahoo, or focus on more of the web portal aspect
of
the website. In August of 2010, Yahoo implemented a deal with
Microsoft that let Microsoft's Bing search engine to power their
search engine. Hence, any search results you view through the
Yahoo
website will be the same results you find through Bing.
Yahoo fell further in the search engine rankings in December 2011,
after Bing took over as the second most popular search engine in
the
US. This is definitely not good news for a company which is
regarded
as one of the pioneers of the Internet era, and still has a
worldwide
user base. Many critics have put Yahoo's downward spiral due to
the
fact that they have not been competitive enough to keep up with
Google's behemoth search engine, and not innovated a way to break
into the social networking scene, which is being dominated by
Facebook.
In April, Yahoo laid off about 14% of its employees
in a bid to save around $375 million dollars for the company.
Yahoo
will be hoping Ms Mayer will provide them with a renewed and
energetic vision for the company, that can guide them out of rocky
waters and back amongst the biggies of the technology industry.