Outside of the tech world, the news that Marissa Mayer was to be appointed the CEO of Yahoo! probably elicited quiet murmurs of confusion. For all that she is a (former) "superstar" Googler, she doesn't have anywhere near the recognition of the top tier of Silicon Valley bosses – the Larry Pages and Mark Zuckerbergs – nor really even the second tier, like Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg or Apple's Tim Cook.

If you want to know more about the sort of woman who cheerily states that "my maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I'll work throughout it," the Guardian's Josh Halliday and Charles Arthur have an excellent profile of her:

Eleven years ago on Thursday, Mayer was one of 15 Googlers behind the company's famous motto: Don't Be Evil. According to Steven Levy's In the Plex, published last year, Mayer was on the three-strong team who invented Google AdWords, the groundbreaking algorithm that linked advertisers' keywords to search results and helped deliver 96% of the company's $10.6bn revenues in the first quarter of last year.