Yahoo Launches Beta Version of Homepage

There's been talk on various news outlets about a new beta version of the Yahoo home page, and now you can see it at http://www.yahoo.com/beta.html . While I liked some of it, I think it's also got some major problems.

The first thing I thought when I looked at the page was "Where's the directory?" For my display -- 19 inch monitor with 1024 x 768 resolution, running Opera 6.x -- the actual topic directory was not "above the fold"; it was on the second page. I'm not a big fan of Jakob Nielsen but shouldn't the topic directory be the focus of Yahoo's home page? Furthermore, the search box was so far away from the topic listing that they hardly looked related to each other.

Perhaps I'm simple but it seems to me that there are some cross-purposes going on here. I mean, I understand the need for Yahoo to generate revenue. And advertising has to be a lot more than it used to be in order to a) make an impact and b) bringing in the advertising dollars.

But Yahoo is working both sides of the coin. Yahoo is charging commercial sites a few hundred bucks a year to list their sites. They've got a deal with Overture and are also selling advertising within the directory. How do they justify to potential customers that kind of cash layout when their homepage puts less focus on the topic directory?

Well, currently they can do it because practically everybody on the Internet knows Yahoo. And there are millions of links to Yahoo. But that is inertia. That is people linking to Yahoo because of what they were one year ago or two years ago or even five years ago. What Yahoo is now is steadily increasing fees, potential customer alienation (privacy policy, GeoCities Terms of Use, etc.), and more and more intrusive advertising. They can go so far on inertia, but once a competitor steps up (Terra Lycos and Google are both candidates, in my opinion) they are in trouble.

Does that mean I hate the home page completely? No. The regional Yahoos are presented nicely. The more Yahoos listing is in a more readable font; in fact the whole page is more readable with the larger text. I just wish they would bring the focus more to the topic index, where they started and where it seems to me they have a decent chance of generating revenue.

Posted to Search Engines-Yahoo