By: Isabel Gonçalves
Marissa Mayer, one of the top executives at Google, will be the next C.E.O. of Yahoo, the search engine which has had a rotating roster of CEO's over the past five years.
Mayer, 37, ran Google's search group for years and most recently has lead the location and local division; she's also always been one of the company's best spokespeople. She is one of the company's oldest employees and its first female engineer.
Yahoo is struggling to bounce back from years of financial decline and internal turmoil. Jerry Yang, one of Yahoo's co-founders and CEO's from June 2007 to January 2009, had been criticized by many investors, including Carl Icahn, for not increasing revenues and stock price, while there has been a exodus of executives.
In January 2009, Yahoo appointed Carol Bartz, the former executive chairman of Autodesk, as CEO. She was then replaced by CFO Tim Morse in September 2011 when he was named Interim CEO.
Earlier in January this year, Scott Thompson, former President of PayPal, was named the new chief executive officer. He was later replaced in May by Ross Levinsohn as the company's interim CEO. Thompson left the company after activist shareholders revealed that he had exaggerated his academic credentials. Jerry Yang left the company and resigned from the board in January this year.
