Yahoo rolled out a customizable home page design Tuesday amid uncertainty about whether Microsoft and Yahoo may announce a search-advertising deal.
The new portal is called Yahoo Front Doors and enables users to build a customized home page and add widgets to display special content like the weather. Direct links to popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and eBay can be added to a My Favorites menu on the left side. It’s the first redesign of the main Yahoo page since 2006.
Rolling over a default selection under the My Favorites menu pops up a preview window using Ajax technology, which means users won’t have to install plug-ins like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. Additional choices can be selected with an Add button, including MySpace and rival Google’s Gmail site.
Yahoo plans a synchronization feature that will put the customized home page on mobile devices. The new design can be previewed in the U.S. at http://yahoo.com/trynew. It will be rolled out in other countries and on mobile devices over the next week.
Customizing the Yahoo home page appears to be an effort to compete with Google’s iGoogle and Microsoft’s MSN. Yahoo also introduced a beta Search Pad feature earlier this month that lets users take notes from search results and share them with friends.
These changes could also be an effort to make Yahoo more attractive to Microsoft as top executives of the companies discuss a possible deal that would let them better compete with search-advertising leader Google. According to comScore, Google had 65 percent of the search market in June, Yahoo had 19.5 percent, and Microsoft had just 8.4 percent despite the launch of its Bing search engine last month.
Microsoft is likely to be watching as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz announces Yahoo’s earnings after the market closes on Tuesday. If the companies are…