New Yahoo! Homepage, Google Notebook

Yahoo!'s new homepage is live. Here's the old one for comparison purposes. The new page is much better looking (with a bigger display ad) than the old homepage, which was very text heavy. The new page is more visual and better organized. The page does a better job of surfacing and integrating Yahoo!'s vast array of services.

Local is available in four distinct places on the home page: 1) above the search bar, 2) in the "personal" module (w/maps) in the upper right, 3) on the left-hand vertical navigation column (w/maps) and in the lower right in the "Yahoo! pulse" area, which rotates different content (local is in the rotation) based on user popularity (e.g., "best pizza restaurants in the US").

When I'm signed in I would expect that I'll start to be targeted with different ads throughout the Yahoo! network, based on my browsing behavior and/or my demographic profile (from my Yahoo! registration). I haven't confirmed that with Yahoo! but that's what I would anticipate.

It's a better and more functional design. Yahoo! is the number 1 destination on the Internet so this won't necessarily help the portal get more uniques. Whether it boosts search usage is another question that will be floating around. That remains to be seen. But in terms of organizing and presenting Yahoo!'s content empire and making it more "coherent," it does a much better job.

One surprise: there's no video on the homepage. I would have expected that. But maybe that's coming (certainly one could expect the flash display ad to become a "TV commercial" over time.

Here's more from the Yahoo! Search Blog a long review from Richard McManus' Read/Write blog with some nice screenshots and a podcast for those with more time on their hands. 🙂

Also today, Google Notebook became available. I have downloaded it but haven't used it yet. Here's my previous post on Notebook.

Chris Sherman at SEW has a fairly extensive review of Google Notebook here.  

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Update: There is in fact video on the Yahoo! homepage, it's the third tab in the middle news section — somewhat buried.

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