Sunnyvale, California — An outstandingly revamped home page is finally coming to the Yahoo.com, one of the top-most traveled destinations on the Internet, and the company’s search page will follow suit starting next month. Struggling search engine pioneer Yahoo Inc. is expected to launch its new homepage today, as the company strives to make itself more relevant to Web surfers and establish new ways to sell advertising.
Yahoo’s renovation of its chief site, originally scheduled for this fall, has been one of its biggest projects over the past year. The project, internally called as "Metro," was initiated under Yahoo’s former chief executive, Jerry Yang, as a way to let users customize the site with links to other Internet services with which Yahoo has been continually competing for users’ attention.
Yahoo plans to debut a test version of the page in the United States and let the users start selecting a new, more personalized version of the home page beginning Tuesday afternoon, and then later spread to France, India and the U.K. in the next week, Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said.
The revamped homepage blends Yahoo’s collection of online content and products, and lets people select basic applications to use not just Yahoo sites, but also others’ such as eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, said Tapan Bhat, Yahoo’s senior vice president for consumer experiences.
The site aims to make it easier to access content from across the Web, representing the most "radical" make-over of the site since its inception more than a decade ago.
"It is a sea change in the way we think about products, the way we think about users, and the way we think about our business," Bhat said in a conference call with reporters ahead of the announcement.
This screen shot shows Yahoo’s revamped home page scheduled to debut Tuesday. (Credit: Yahoo)
"The home page was tested by thousands and thousands of people. We got tons of feedback — tens of thousands wrote about what they liked and didn’t," Bhat said. "It was really key to helping us figure out what worked and what didn’t."
The biggest modification in the new design is a left-hand menu that users can customize under a section called My Favorites; with links to dozens of potential third-party software developers may seek to build, such as micro-blogging service Twitter, for example, and Google Inc.’s Gmail, said the people briefed on the plans.
"We are pulling together everything about the user they care about, be it on Yahoo or off, to create a personally relevant experience," Bhat said. "In a world like this, Yahoo needs to make the user experience come first."
Yahoo’s new home page allows applications from Yahoo or others. This shows use of Facebook. (Credit: Yahoo)
The effort is a result of Yahoo’s effort to revitalize its core business: showing content and accompanying advertisements to a large, general audience on the Net. Yahoo’s profitability for years has been trialling that of its main rival, Google, which depends chiefly on search ads for revenue, and Yahoo faces increasing pressure from Microsoft’s online business and new arrivals such as Facebook as well.
The new homepage comes as negotiations between Yahoo and Microsoft Corp. on a search and advertising partnership are regaining momentum.
Yahoo has been testing several versions of the new page for months, but last month said that it would not be completed until this fall. The company was planning on unveiling it as part of a broader rebranding in late September or October, the people familiar with the matter said, along with update to Yahoo’s email program.
Yahoo’s homepage, however, is one of the most visited pages on the Web, and among the most valuable of Yahoo assets. The homepage had more than 100 U.S. million unique visitors a month in June, according to comScore, and 330 million worldwide in May.
The company also hopes for more success with advertisers. "We are creating great opportunities for advertisers to target content and context," Bhat said, demonstrating a movie application that showed a prominent ad along with movie show-times locally tailored for a particular user.
Starting as soon as Tuesday, the new design is expected to be available as an option for users when they go to Yahoo.com, said the people briefed on the plans.
A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment.