Google overtaken by Yahoo!

Google overtaken by Yahoo! in US website visitors for first time in two years

Changes made by new chief executive Marissa Mayer beginning to resonate with users

Yahoo! attracted more website visitors in the United States than Google during July, pushing the company to the top of the online league for the first time in two years.

Nearly 197 million individuals visited a Yahoo! website last month, according to rankings from comScore, versus 192 million for Google. The last time Yahoo! outperformed Google was in May 2011.

The improvement suggests that changes under chief executive Marissa Mayer, who was recruited from Google, are beginning to resonate with the online audience. Mayer has revamped the Yahoo! home page, as well as email and weather services.

The Yahoo! audience total does not include traffic to its newly acquired blogging platform Tumblr, which came in as the 28th most popular site with 38 million visitors.

"No online media outlet would have come close to predicting this, and if they had, you would have said they were insane," said Ed Barton, director of digital media at Strategy Analytics. "This will probably have a positive impact on the share price and if Yahoo! keeps this up, it has a chance of becoming relevant again."

However, comScore's data only paints a partial picture, because it does not include mobile phone usage, which now accounts for a significant amount of Google traffic.