Yahoo is planning on rolling out the redesign of their homepage this Tuesday afternoon. This will be followed a month later by a redesign of the Yahoo search engine.
This redesign should generate the same sort of exposure that the recent Bing update brought to the Microsoft platform. However this release date is currently only within the United States, but it would be safe to assume that Yahoo will roll this out within Europe in the coming weeks.
The new homepage will allow users to select services such as Facebook, eBay and Twitter to feed through into their own personalised homepage. These applications are available within a ‘My Favourites’ list on the left hand side of the page. In order to expand these applications the user must first hover over the link and the resulting page will open along with an advertisement associated with that service. Over recent years Yahoo has seen a significant decrease in search ad revenues, something which Yahoo will be hoping they can rectify with their new application ad placement offering.
The new search page will also carry the same ‘My favourites’ list seen on the homepage, this should allow Yahoo to generate more searches within its engine as users do not need to leave the search results page to get back to their favourite online applications. You don’t have to be a scientist to realise that this new offering holds similarities to the all-in-one foundations set by Yahoo’s main search competitors Google and their iGoogle homepage offering. However with over 60 applications currently available and the ability for users to create their own, the future may well be very bright for Yahoo. I know I will be checking it out when it goes live, as will many other people, but the main challenge for Yahoo is trying to get consumers to actively use the service on a regular basis as opposed to reverting back to their old way of interacting with their favourite online applications.