Marissa Mayer

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Marissa Mayer, 2020.

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Marissa Mayeris an American software engineer and businesswoman who greatly influenced the development of Google Inc., the world’s leading search engine company, in its early years. She later served as CEO and president of Yahoo! Inc. (2012–17).

Mayer and her younger brother grew up in Wausau, where her father worked as an environmental engineer and her mother as an art teacher and homemaker. At Stanford University she studied symbolic systems and computer science with an emphasis on artificial intelligence, receiving a B.S. degree in 1997 and an M.S. degree in 1999.

Mayer declined a high-paying consulting job to take a position with Google in 1999 as the company’s first female software engineer and only its 20th employee. She soon became an influential figure there, steering many highly successful efforts in her roles as product manager, designer, and executive. Mayer designed the search interface of Google’s home page. As the product manager for the company’s search engine, Google Search, for more than 10 years, she was credited with increasing the number of daily searches from a few hundred thousand to more than a billion. Other services and products to which she contributed were Gmail, a free e-mail service; Chrome, a Web browser; Google Maps, a mapping and directions service; Google Earth, which provided detailed satellite images of most locations on Earth; and Street View, a searchable database of street-level photographs.

During her tenure at Google, Mayer helped create a number of patented inventions related to Web-browsing software, including a program that searches saved articles. The system returns information on articles that match the search query and assigns an icon to each selected article, plotting the icons on a visual display. Mayer and her colleagues also patented various systems and methods for customizing news sources, general searches, and the presentation of search results.

In 2012 Mayer became chief executive officer and president of Yahoo! Inc., a global Internet-services company and one of Google’s largest competitors. Many analysts predicted that her appointment would revitalize the company, which had been struggling financially for several years. Mayer soon oversaw a major redesign of Yahoo!’s home page, which was launched in 2013. However, this effort as well as others failed to turn around Yahoo!, and in 2016 it was announced that the company’s core assets, notably its Internet operations, were being sold to Verizon Communications. The deal was finalized in 2017, at which time Mayer resigned from Yahoo!.

In 2018 Mayer cofounded Lumi Labs, which was involved in “building consumer applications enabled by artificial intelligence.” The company was renamed Sunshine in 2020, and that year it released its first product, Sunshine Contacts, an app for managing contact information.

Mayer was known for her attention to detail and her strong sense of aesthetics as well as for her hands-on management style. She served on the boards of a number of nonprofit and for-profit enterprises.