SUNNYVALE, California - Yahoo Inc., moved ahead this week
with a radical redesign of its home page — the most heavily trafficked site on
the Web — making changes that give users a personalized view of the wider Web.
The Internet media giant is under the gun to deliver on
year-old promises to transform Yahoo from a network of more or less insular
properties into "starting points" that help consumers quickly navigate their way
to the rest of the Web.
"We are going to put what matters to you most at your
fingertips," said Tapan Bhat, the senior vice president in charge of "front
doors" — the main destinations at Yahoo, including Yahoo.com, MyYahoo and the
Yahoo toolbar.
The new Yahoo home page features a tab on the left hand
column of the page with sophisticated links to the user’s 10 or 20 favorite
sites. It functions as an alternative to navigation methods like bookmarks, link
bars or browser tabs, he said.
In its simplest sense, Yahoo is blending the broadcast,
editorially-controlled view that Yahoo.com has long offered with the
personalized, self-selected view of information that the company’s MyYahoo
service has long offered. It mixes things users know they want, with the
serendipitous or unexpected.
"For the first time, we are going to marrying those two to
take the best of both," Bhat promised.
The changes, which Yahoo is testing on only a small group of
users initially, will lead to a full-scale overhaul later. Two years ago, the
last such redesign of Yahoo.com took up to six months to fully implement, the
Yahoo executive said.
The makeover of Yahoo.com marks the company’s 14-year
evolution from the Web’s pioneering directory of sites to an index of links to a
search navigation tool to a complex media destination site.
A spokeswoman said Yahoo planned to invite a random sample of
its users amounting to less than 1 percent of audience. The tests will be
conducted in Britain, France, India and the United States, Bhat said.
The new home page relies on slick personalization technology
that allows users who have signed into their Yahoo account to see when new
information arrives not just on Yahoo sites, like e-mail or news, but off-Yahoo
on sites such as eBay Inc auctions or Google Inc.’s Gmail service.
Instead of whisking people to these sites, users can see a
preview of the information while staying on the home page, which allows them to
quickly navigate across a range of their favorite sites. The Yahoo home page
attracts around 100 million US users a month and 300 million worldwide, Bhat
said.
Yahoo is relying on new technology it calls the Content
Optimization Knowledge Engine to help its computers determine what the most
engaging content may be to a specific user, then serve it up based on their
prior surfing habits. Relevant ads tied to users’ particular interests are
delivered as well.
Yahoo is moving carefully with this personalized approach in the knowledge
that less than 15 percent of its user base subscribes to its existing MyYahoo
personalization service. - Reuters
