Yahoo facelift enters trial stage

YAHOO is moving ahead with a radical redesign of its homepage — the most heavily trafficked site on the web — making changes that give users a personalised 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 MyYahoo Yahoo.com, and the Yahoo toolbar.

The new Yahoo homepage features a tab on the left hand column of the page with sophisticated links to the user’s 10 or 20 favourite 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 personalised, 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 marry 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.

A spokeswoman said Yahoo planned to invite a random sample of its users amounting to less than one percent of audience. The tests will be conducted in Britain, France, India and the US, Bhat said.

The new homepage relies on slick personalisation 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 auctions or Google’s Gmail service.

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.

Instead of whisking people to these sites, users can see a preview of the information while staying on the homepage, which allows them to quickly navigate across a range of their favourite sites.

The Yahoo homepage attracts around 300 million users a month, Bhat said.