In 1999, the personalised “My Yahoo” homepage won a technical achievement prize at the Webby Awards in San Francisco. A decade later, however, the family of websites devoted to news, entertainment, finance and sports content is struggling to keep up with its web rivals Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Since being brought in as chief executive a year ago to revitalise Yahoo, Carol Bartz has made the websites more inclusive, allowing users to incorporate content from outside providers, and spread the word via a $100m campaign with taglines such as: “The internet is under new management: Yours”.

But, when asked whether the proportion of Yahoo's 600m global audience that interacts with the site in this way has increased, Ms Bartz answers – “not at all”.