Google’s former CEO and current executive chairman Eric Schmidt has congratulated Yahoo!, one of the Internet giant’s biggest competitors, on appointing Marissa Mayer to be its CEO.

“Yahoo! has made a good choice and I am personally very excited to see another woman become CEO of a technology company,” Schmidt said in an emailed statement. “Best wishes to Marissa and Yahoo!”

Yahoo! announced the appointment Monday. Mayer is veteran of Google, where she took part in managing the launch of hit products like Gmail, Google News, Google Maps, Street View and image search, among many others.

Learn about Yahoo!’s data center strategy from its project manager for data center development Mozan Totani at this week’s DatacenterDynamics conference in San Francisco

Mayer started at Google in 1999 as the company’s 20^th employee and its first female engineer. Larry Page, one of Google’s two co-founders and its current CEO, said, Mayer had been a “tireless champion of our users,” while at Google.

“She contributed to the development of our Search, Geo, Local and other products,” he said. “We will miss her talents at Google.”

Yahoo! said Mayer’s appointment signaled a renewed focus on product innovation to drive user experience and advertising revenue. The company currently boasts more than 700m users.

In accepting her new role at Yahoo!, Mayer is taking a hot seat. Its previous occupier and former PayPal president Scott Thompson resigned in March, following accusations of having lied about his academic record when he was appointed to the role only two months earlier.

Thompson was a replacement for Caron Bartz, who was removed from the post by the company’s board of directors in September 2011 after she had reportedly failed to turn around a company that was losing market share to Google and Facebook. Yahoo!’s CFO Timothy Morse was its interim chief executive between the time Bartz was fired and Thompson was appointed to the role.

Most recently, Mayer oversaw product management, engineering, design and strategy for Google’s suite of local and geographical products, such as Maps, Google Earth, Zagat, Street View and others. In her 13 years with the company, she has been an engineer, designer, product manager and executive.

She has a bachelor’s degree in symbolic systems and a master’s in computer science from Stanford University.