AlyssaS - 9:26 am on Jul 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

Mrs. Mayer will have a hard time. While she may partly be behind the success of Google search product, she had been also for years the head of product at Google. And what successes did she have there? Has there been any other overwhelming success apart from Google search? Or have they just been throwing product over product to the wall to see which sticks?

She wasn't actually in charge of products. I'm pretty sure she spent most of her time on the User Interface, and then on Local stuff.

The User Interface was a huge success. There's a school of thought that Google's success compared to other search engines was really a marketing triumph based on the UI. The search results were not that different to other engines, what made G stand out was the clean user interface, and even after they put in ads, they were discreet and clearly delineated. It's only after Marissa Mayer gets moved to Local do we see the UI change, not just in color scheme but in the way the yellow box of the ads has been diluted to the point where it's hard to see.

To me that shows that she understands how searchers and users feel about things (which is rare, everyone, including webmasters, tends to focus on what they want out of a site, especially more revenue, at the expense of the user experience).

If she can transform Yahoo's marketing of itself, who knows what will happen? I'm pretty sure we'll see a new "look" to Yahoo (and remember that part of Bing's launch involved the look with teh daily picture for example - how things look matters, it's not just about technology).