Yahoo have ventured into the most significant change in their evolution so far. Yahoo has launched a new revamped personalised homepage for their search engine. They plan to use the US as a testing platform and then launch fully in the autumn across the web.
The search engine will now have a more customisable format which lets users personalize the Yahoo homepage by linking to third parties like Facebook and Twitter. They are promoting the website as similar to the Apple iPhone where you can add applications.
Yahoo has described this move as the most "radical" and "fundamental" make-over of their website since they launched their search engine more than a decade ago. This is clearly a knee jerk reaction to the growing success of Bing which was Microsoft’s rejuvenation of their old search engine Live! Search.
Yahoo's Head of Consumer Experiences Tapan Bhat has been quoted as saying "We want to be at the centre of people's lives online.” This indicates that Yahoo wants to reinforce their position as a gateway to the web. They have tried to design a new homepage which will make Yahoo a more popular central hub for people to access everything on the web. This does come in the wake of them losing ground in usage trends to the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter.
According to figures by Comscore, in May 2009 Yahoo was the fourth most popular website in the UK with 22.5 million hits, but was used for only 4% of internet searches, compared with Google's 79%.
There is no doubt that Yahoo is trying to revitalise itself, but this so called “radical” change is still overshadowed by the future as the company faces increasing competition from the growing success of Bing, and Microsoft’s take over threats.
It is rumoured that Yahoo could be looking to sign an agreement with Microsoft for search and advertising partnership. But the question is would this be a partnership or effectively a merger?
Again we come to the age old phrase of “time will tell”. Will Yahoo’s ambitious new personalised homepage gain them more usage popularity? Will they have the same success Bing has had? Or potentially will we see a new search engine chimera formed out of a Yahoo / Microsoft merger to challenge Google’s reign?
