Yahoo! chief Mayer wants Microsoft's Bing to take marketshare from Google Search

Google veteran turned Yahoo! chief Marissa Mayer wants Microsoft to deliver when it comes to wresting market share from the Internet company she was part of for more than a decade.

During a talk at a financial analysts conference on Tuesday, Mayer spoke of "nice gains" in revenue from Bing-powered searches at Yahoo! websites but a pressing need for the Microsoft engine to win users from rivals.

Yahoo! inked a 10-year alliance with Microsoft in 2009 to have Bing handle the heavy lifting of mining and indexing the vast array of online data, leaving the California-based Internet pioneer to customize results for users.

"We have to make the alliance work well enough that we are gaining share from the market," Mayer said when asked about the future of the partnership onstage at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco.

"We collectively want to grow share rather than just trade share with each other."

Echoing a theme oft heard at Google, Mayer stressed the need for speed when it comes to delivering fresh and relevant results to online queries.

Google continued to rule the US market at the end of last year, handling 66.7 percent of core searches, while Microsoft and Yahoo! sites fielded 16.3 percent and 12.2 percent, respectively, according to industry tracker comScore.

Mayer was Google's first female engineer when in June 1999 she became employee number 20 at the company created by Stanford University classmates Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

She left Google last July to take the job of chief at Yahoo!, which is struggling to re-invent itself after being eclipsed as the ruling Internet search platform.

Mayer managed some of Google's most successful innovations and influenced an array of the company's most recognized features, such as its globally popular search engine and uncluttered home page.