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Historians looking back on 2013 might want to call it the Marissa Mayer Effect. Others, more accurately, could attribute Yahoo!'s web traffic leap ahead of Google in the US in July to largely being a hat-tip to, er, Google.

Mayer, of course, is a Google alumnus and knows a thing or two about driving traffic to web properties.

According to Comscore's latest figures, more than 196 million US netizens were using Yahoo! in July – up 21 per cent from 2012's numbers.

Significantly, it also meant that the Purple Palace was bigger than Google last month. It had 4.3 million more visitors than the Chocolate Factory.

And, surprisingly, those metrics were not helped by Yahoo!'s recent takeover of one-time porn-penetrated Tumblr, which Mayer's company bought in May for a titillating and fanciful $1bn and then stripped it of all (or most of) the tits'n'ass it was once famed for.

Yahoo!'s CEO – 13 months into her new job – has been scooping up Web 2.0 properties to build her empire in a fight to regain eyeballs that were once long ago lost to her former employer.

She's yet to solve the revenue conundrum, however. Yahoo! reported flat quarterly sales of $1.08bn last month.

Comscore said that the US has 225 million internet users, which means that a whopping 87.2 per cent of them were hanging out on Yahoo! in July. Vulture Central expects Mayer will be sending Google a thank-you letter in the post for teaching her how it's done. ®

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