Yahoo! tries again with new home page design

Lately when you hear about Yahoo! in the news, it's been about changing CEOs or flirting with Microsoft. What it hasn't been about is their core purpose and that's as a search product. That's why it was refreshing to learn, the other day, that they were making headlines for redesigning their home page instead of some tangential subject.

Over time, Yahoo! has remained surprisingly steady in the search engine race for market share. According to statistics from Comscore, they stayed at around 20 percent market share for April and June of this year, but the numbers don't really include the impact of Bing, Microsoft's newly designed search tool, in the overall picture. One thing that is clear though is that Google is firmly in control with 65 percent of web searches. Yahoo! is way back in second place and Microsoft is a distant third with just 8 percent.

The biggest feature on the new page is the ability for users to customize the links bar on the left side of the page. In the previous version, links only provided access to Yahoo! services. Now, users can customize this list. By default it includes access to popular sites like eBay and Facebook and it enables users to update Facebook information without leaving the Yahoo! site, which could leave eyeballs on Yahoo!

Who knows if the new design has any impact on the search engine market share numbers or if Bing is beginning to eat into Yahoo! instead of Google. All this should become clearer when the new numbers come out in third quarter. For now, it's good to see Yahoo! being proactive and keeping both Microsoft and Google honest in the web search market.

For more information:
- see the Yahoo! press release

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