Yahoo 'makeover' home page

Yahoo will expose a brand new face this afternoon in an effort to maintain the world's most popular "online destination" and seduce advertisers.

Source: AP

In the beginning, the new homepage will only appear in the US and Europe at http://www.yahoo.com/preview. With a lot of new interactive features, users will not need to click through to other pages to see the weather, email, listen to music or recognize the traffic situation in the area.

Another new feature is Yahoo Pulse, which provides insightful insights into emerging cultural trends in the world.

Replace the skin to change meat

Yahoo began upgrading its home page in the middle of a battle with rival rivals like MSN, AOL, and Google entering a critical phase. And yet, Yahoo has to build a defensive barrier against the aggression of virtual social forums like MySpace.com.

" Our goal is to build the best website on the Internet, " said Dan Rosenweig, Yahoo managing director.

This reform marked the first significant "change of heart" of the Yahoo homepage since September 2004 to date. In fact, it is a complete "makeover" of the 1994 Yahoo Web site, when two Stanford college students - Jerry Wang and David Filo - were created.

" Previously, Yahoo's site looked very backward, but it is now very clean, bright, modern and concentrated, " said Jupiter Research analyst David Card.

However, Card believes that Yahoo's new website still can't impress young people who are spending most of their time surfing the web on MySpace.com.

The most significant change of the homepage is the highly interactive menu, with weather icons, traffic, movie information and instant access to popular Yahoo services such as email, IM chat and music listening. .

Taking a risky step

However, home page reform is also a risky step. Of course, Yahoo wants to step in with the rapid pace of Internet change, but if you change too much, too hard, old users - already familiar with the old interface - will feel strange and uneasy.

To prevent this bad situation from happening, Yahoo chose the final design codenamed "Spirit" after months of testing with a select group of users. More cautiously, they didn't set the new interface as Yahoo.com's default homepage within the first few months.

In the past year, the two most visited websites after Yahoo, MSN and AOL, have also changed their interface in turn. The most terrible molting is MSN, with many ambitious and secret strategies of Microsoft.

For my part, although Google's home page doesn't have much of a search engine, it allows users to customize the homepage according to their personal preferences.

The fight for the hit

Statistics in April show that: Yahoo leads the way with 105.4 million visitors, an increase of 11% compared to last year. MSN ranked second with 92.8 million others, an increase of 6% compared to last year. Followed closely by Google, with traffic surging 27% to 92.1 million people. AOL stayed on the ground with 70.4 million visitors.

Meanwhile, traffic to MySpace.com - primarily teen and youth - has more than quadrupled in the past 12 months, reaching 38.4 million unique US visitors. In addition, the number of websites in MySpace was viewed as a total of . 19 billion pages in April, surpassing Google (11.9 billion pages), MSN (11.5 billion pages) and AOL (6.8 billion pages).

Yahoo is still the most viewed site, with 31.2 billion pages in April. But analysts believe MySpace's ascension growth is overshadowing all the big guys.

"The big guys will have to change a lot because of the appearance of sites like MySpace, " said Gartner analyst Mike McGuire.

Maintaining the title of the most viewed and most visited website is extremely important for Yahoo, a company that has the most profits from advertising.

Thien Y