Yahoo is about to implement significant changes to its aging homepage and will start sticking other people’s content onto the site. The company’s search page is also set for a redesign next month.
Yahoo’s big idea is to let customers select and design a more personalized version of the home page from this afternoon. It will allow people to access eBay, Facebook, and Twitter from a single home page.
According to the company, third party applications will be available on the left side of the page under a customizable section called My Favorites. If you place your mouse over them a mouse pointer makes each application and its accompanying advertising pop up.
Yahoo said that the home page will pull together ‘everything the user cares about’, be it on Yahoo or off.
The homepage was one of the first things that Chief Executive Carol Bartz demanded was changed. She felt that it was out of date and not particularly useful.
Yahoo has stayed the same even though it has seen fashions in web pages change over the years. The site is visited by 340 million people monthly
Things might change if Yahoo signs a partnership deal with Microsoft. This will mean that it will be able to show its own display ads in applications adjacent to search results could help the company extract more money from its search operation.
In actual fact. Yahoo announced the new front page plan in October 2007. It took a year of “bucket testing” trying variations of the new page on randomly selected users.
While Bartz might have put the fear of the Goddess into the developers of the home page and sped up the work on the home page, the revamp we are expecting to see today is still only a beta.
The change will also be rolled out to the UK, France, and India next week, in Spain and Mexico next month and in Asia next year, Yahoo said.
