Yahoo personalizes new homepage

Yahoo Inc. launched a redesign of its popular Internet home page at www.yahoo.com, displaying a more prominent section for Web searches and reconfiguring its display menu. Like Google and Microsoft, Yahoo is introducing clickable tools to let users customize what they see. Alongside the search box will be an assistant that tells people if new messages are in their Yahoo e-mail inbox, a section for popular searches and an expanded news section. In making the changes, Yahoo is the last of the big three search firms to re-focus its main web presence on what users want to do. There will be a variety of new and enhanced features, including:

• Yahoo! Pulse: People can instantly discover what's hot on the Web in this unique new section of the home page - including the most popular and interesting Yahoo! searches, as well as the latest trends, music, videos, photos, people and opinions. Yahoo! Pulse highlights what the estimated half a billion monthly users of Yahoo! branded services are looking for, reading, viewing, listening to, rating or sharing online.
• Expanded Content: Thought-provoking feature stories, fresh entertainment, sports and finance content, as well as more of the latest national, world and video news are all hand-picked and updated by Yahoo!'s home page editors.
• Enhanced Search Box: The newly designed and positioned Yahoo! Search box offers consumers a more prominent gateway to the Web, news, multimedia content, local information, shopping and Yahoo!'s directory to help them find exactly what they want quickly. Additionally, home page visitors can leverage the collective knowledge and experience of real people by accessing Yahoo! Answers just beneath the Yahoo! Search box.
• Simple Navigation: Buttons near the top of the page link to Yahoo!'s other popular starting points, My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mail. Other frequently used Yahoo! products and services are easy to find in a simple column of links, and new content tabs deliver more of the day's important news right on the home page.
• More Control: Colors are easily tailored to fit a person's preferences with only a click of the mouse. Complementing My Yahoo!, the most popular personalized start page, the new yahoo.com gives consumers a home page that is immediately more useful and relevant for them.

The new Yahoo! home page is available as a beta, or test, version for the next month to assess how users repond to the alterations in the United States at www.yahoo.com/preview, with local preview versions in the UK and Ireland, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. More enhancements to the page will be added over the coming months, and it will be made generally available in all global markets later this summer. The new look pages aim to move away from the old-fashioned static site where people were simply presented with a page listing everything a web portal did. Users will now be able to customise what they see, remove the bits they never look at and add those others parts of the Yahoo empire that they regularly use. They will also be able to change the layout and the colour of the page. The driving force behind these acquisitions has been the desire to get hold of ready-made communities to sell to. - Internet war between China and US - Should Microsoft Give In To Investor Panic? - eWeek - Telecom Asia Daily / Wireless Asia - All Headline News - kgw.com (subscription)

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