Yahoo launches new homepage for India

In a move aimed at regaining the ground it earlier lost to competitors, Yahoo, on Friday, launched a brand new homepage in India and five other countries, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

The new Yahoo! Homepage allows users to more easily to discover the content they seek The Hindu reported, quoting IM Swaminathan, director, media product and business operations, India & South East Asia.

He added, this was the starting phase of the renaissance and the idea was to make it entertaining and a daily habit.

The new homepage offered ease of use along with a limitless content stream offering most popular stories. Users can also choose from  'read', 'save for later' or 'delete'.

The homepage offers new utility apps such as Yahoo! Weather, Finance and Flickr, as also a seamless experience across desktops, tablets and smart phones.

Meanwhile, it has been almost a year since the new homepage went live in the US.

According to Swaminathan, the philosophy was to get it right for one market and then scale it and replicate it across markets. He added, after it launched in the US, it went through multiple iterations.

Yahoo! has over 800 million users globally of which mobile internet users make up half.

A salient feature of the new home page is endless scrolling, with the loading of news stories happening as one scrolled. Users need not bother about clicking for more content. Users can also check out on the local weather, horoscope, trending stories, Flickr photos, stocks and upcoming birthdays (through Facebook sign-in).

The new homepage comes only days after Yahoo deciding to to block Facebook and Google sign-ins to use its services (See: Yahoo denies access with Facebook or Google logins).

According to Nitin Mathur, senior director and head of marketing, Yahoo India and Southeast Asia, the new Yahoo homepage boasted a cleaner look, was easy to use and allowed users to personalise the page to quickly find stories they liked.

He added a team of editors picked top stories, while Yahoo's algorithms showed the rest of the stories based on what users had clicked.