Yahoo! sported a new look yesterday in a make-over tailored by style savvy and engineering smart Chief Marissa Mayer.

Web pages long cluttered with low-brow ads were re-designed to highlight news of interest to visitors along with feeds of what is getting attention online.

“Designed to be more intuitive and personal, the new Yahoo! experience is all about your interests and preferences,” Mayer said in a blog post.

“Yahoo! has always been about bringing you the very best of the web. And, today, we’re introducing a new, more modern experience to do just that.”

Mayer took over in July at Yahoo! after 13 years at Google, having been hired as the 20th employee and first woman engineer at the company that went on to be the new king of Internet search.

Shortly after taking over at Yahoo!, Mayer expressed a vision to “make the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining.”

Mayer joined Yahoo! as the fifth chief executive there in as many years as the struggling Internet search pioneer tried to reinvent itself as a “premier digital media” company after withering in Google’s shadow.

Mayer has echoed the mantra of predecessors who maintained that the company could find prosperity by mining information about users to insightfully tailor online content and target money-making advertising.

Yahoo! in 2009 began letting Bing handle the labour-intensive job of finding and indexing content on the Internet, freeing itself to concentrate on interesting or personalized ways to present results.

The re-designed Yahoo! pages rolled out in the United States today were a step along the path directed by Mayer.

“Whether you are a sports fanatic or entertainment buff, you can easily customize your newsfeed to your interests,” Mayer said.

Yahoo! websites have also been optimised for access from smartphones or tablet computers, according to Mayer, who added that online services have been made faster with “under-the-hood improvements.”

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