The new yahoo home page
Yahoo! released a new home page recently. I suppose most/any of you who read this blog already know this great piece of news. It’s been well covered all over the press including techcrunch, business week. You can find Scott Gatz’s (Director of PM in personalization @ yahoo) blog talking about some of the finer thinking that went into the design.
Since i left yahoo!, I tried not to comment about yahoo!’s products, whether good or bad. I guess i couldn’t resist myself in posting about the new home page though.
When i started at yahoo, the top brass always compared yahoo against AOL and measured themselves. I guess a bulk of the content strategy also arose out of replicating aol out on the web. I am not sure who said it and when it was said, but people repeatedly noticed a key contrast between AOL & Yahoo. AOL is about the network, it’s closed and confined (I guess the original walled garden). In contrast, Yahoo is about being a guide to web. We have a directory and we always point to the best content on the web. I heard Tim koogle, David filo espouse very similar idealogy to above. The web directory was a very important part of yahoo! not because of revenue, but because it’s yahoo!’s way of pointing to the best of the web. So Once upon a time, Yahoo! sports had links to ESPN.com and CBS sportsline, and yahoo! autos had links to useful automotive sites on the web as well.
Slowly, yahoo! started changed from being about the web, to being about yahoo! properties. This change has been happening over several years. I don’t have the insight to determine why this change happened, if it’s a conscious choice of the founders etc. But, somewhere along the way, linking to useful sites on the web became a bad thing 
. Links became commercial, and our own ability to identify the best on the web never kept up and consequently, product teams dropped web links non-yahoo sites one after the other. Instead, these links were taken up by links to other parts of yahoo! network, whether they are relevant or not.
This homepage dropped the concept of website directory completely. I guess the transformation is complete. Yahoo! is now more about showing people in and around yahoo! network and not about showing people what’s most useful on the web. Yahoo! is the new AOL of the web…
May 18th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
You said it, Ravi. Felt exactly the same though not as poignantly as yourself. Yahoo! yellow pages used to be so well organized but now most of the services except Yahoo! finance is a clutter. I am still a big fan of Yahoo but dont like the direction they are headed in. With the largest profile base, yahoo could be so much cooler in addressing consumer needs than go around with a stomping foot showcasing only their network. Sigh !
June 6th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
While the directory might have moved off the home page, I think that the AOL comparison is wrong. I think the directory has dropped off because it’s just not very useful in finding the useful things on the web (I don’t even *remember* the last time I used the directory).
Search has become the primary way users get to “good stuff,” and I think that in that regard, the new home page is definitely an improvement.
Also worth pointing out in that regard is the prominence that Answers is given. That, along with MyWeb and del.icio.us and many other properties is part of a big commitment to social search, which, far from a throwback, is the next level of decentralization - it not only distributes editorial to individuals, but allows users to participate without even having to be a site publisher.
To me, that, and Yahoo’s other moves (especially with their developer network) signal an *increased* commitment and engagement with the web rather than the reverse.
Of course, my opinion is that of someone from the outside moving in (I started working at Yahoo! in November) rather than inside moving out, so maybe there’s some of that coloring the difference of opinion.
July 3rd, 2006 at 3:31 pm
One of the reasons the directory was de-emphasized due to the challenges of keeping it updated. Everday Yahoo! would get thousands of submissions without any possible way to keeping up with the evolving web. The same fate happened to DMOZ. In many cases, tag clouds are a decentralized replacement for the directory generated by users. Tag clouds reduce the rigid bounds but still have many issues in terms of consistency and completeness.