Facelifts All Around: Yahoo!, Yahoo! Finance, Google SERPS
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Written By Reprise Media | July 17, 2006 | Share This
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The start of a new week is seeing new looks from Google and Yahoo!, led by an overhaul to Yahoo!’s market-leading Finance page.
Reuters breaks down the makeover. First off, the Yahoo! Finance message boards have been re-structured based on threaded, topic-specific discussions. Additionally, Yahoo! hopes to tone down the wild west atmosphere of boards by introducing a way to rate posts on a scale of 1 to 5 stars, with lower rated posts to be filtered out - although this could just usher in an even lamer version of ’star wars’ than episodes I-III.
Yahoo! Finance will also start piping in business news videos from a number of sources, starting with ABC.com, CNN.com, Forbes.com and SmartMoney. Lastly, hey’ve retooled their stock charts, possibly in response to the oohs and ahhs garnered by Google Finance when their AJAX-driven charts first debuted (not that G Finance has done much to grab market share since). Yahoo!’s charts support “drag and drop” interactivity, and “historical stock price data reaching back decades.” You can even embed a chart in a blog or other external site. They’ve put a lot of work into this, so hopefully it won’t be a flop with users - paidContent says that the early returns are leaning “surprisingly vitriolic.”
The Finance page redesign accompanies a change to the Yahoo.com front page, the new look of which has been available for viewing and testing since February. They’re hoping to get some viral video help to promote the changes, according to the press release; they’ve recruited film students to make videos that “humorously” report the changeover to the world, and they’re inviting anyone else to pick up a camera and chime in “with their own creative take on the theme.”
Maps ever more pervasive in Google-verse Not as heralded (but still noteworthy), Google Maps have started showing up in the engine’s search results pages in response to certain queries. Enter a business name and a location (city, state) to see the first local result plotted on a mini Google Map at the top of the results, along with the listing’s address and phone number. You’ll also see a link to “directions” and “more local results” (if there are any). Spotted by Barry Schwartz.
Topics: Yahoo! |