Meet The New Yahoo! Home Page

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 Leave a comment

Same as the old Yahoo! Home Page?

Yes, Yahoo! has redesigned its home page. That’s it. Redesigned. Not overhauled. Not rethunk. Redesigned. Nothing more.

So what’s so different? Not much. The focus is still on small business and Yahoo! features. However, there are the additional elements of eBay, MySpace, and Facebook in the menu bar. So that’s something. But not much.

The big and most noticeable difference between the new and old Yahoo! home page is the header area with the Yahoo! logo and search bar. No more red. Lots more purple. Frankly, I like it. The Yahoo! logo is left of the search bar now, not on top, and it actually makes me want to search. But that doesn’t mean that Yahoo! focus is on search. It just means they’ve made their search feature look different. But better?Not sure yet, but time will tell.

Here’s a run down of the new features as described on the Yahoo! Blog along with my impression of them:

  • My Favorites – OK, not bad.
  • App Maker – Cool. As it should be.
  • Trend Setter - Not bad. But who uses Yahoo! for search? Besides all those people who have it set as their default page because they don’t know how to change it in their browser?
  • PC to Mobile Sync (coming soon) - This should actually be pretty useful.
  • News, Your Way – Is this really any different than before? I couldn’t tell.
  • Social Updates – This is probably one of the best features to the new home page, but it could be better. All I see is a little box at the top of the page on the right, just above Popular Searches. I’m betting it won’t get much use there. The feature should be much more obvious and accessible and the integration with Facebook and MySpace is hardly noticeable.

Yahoo! calls this the biggest update to its home page in Yahoo!s history. If that’s so then they really need to consider bigger steps forward. But I’m not quite sure it’s an accurate statement. I remember the 1995 version of Yahoo!s home page and it looked quite a bit different than today’s. Still, incorporating social elements into the home page is a great move. I just wish they went a little further. How about the addition of Twitter and LinkedIn, which would be intuitive resources for small businesses, Yahoo!s openly-obvious target market?

Yes, I think Yahoo! is moving in the right direction, but if there is any expectation that this will keep Yahoo! users from migrating elsewhere to find information online, I’m not banking on it. It may keep a few loyal users, but that’s about it. What’s your take?

Try the new Yahoo! home page here.

Leave a comment                      Category: Search Engines                      

Read similar posts in Search Engines

No Comments

No comments yet.

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Search Engine Optimization Journal is an SEO Blog that discusses Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Ranking and Positioning for the new and advanced reader.