Yahoo India, which lost its leadership position to Google, is trying to gain back its market share in India with the launch of its new homepage.
The internet major expects the new launch to substantially improve the usage of all its properties – search engines, mails and photo-sharing applications among others. The company launched its new homepage on Friday.
“It’s a more fluid, visual design. The biggest beauty about this is it works seamlessly across all three screens (personal computers, mobile phones and tablets),” said I.M. Swaminathan, Director, Media Product and Business Operations, India & South East Asia at Yahoo.
The other features include an infinite scroll (the web page never ends), personalised homepage (based on user’s surfing behaviour), Yahoo video, Yahoo weather among others.
“The idea was to make it entertaining. The re-launch is based on user feedbacks and research,” Swaminathan said, adding, India homepage content includes cricket, news, celebrity and astrology among others.
The content is also personalised, meaning when users delete content based on a particular topic the search engine stops showing it again.
Apart from India, Yahoo launched the new homepage for five other countries – Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. However, the launch in India is with a one-year lag after its US launch.
Yahoo terms itself as the world’s largest start-up due as it keeps on adding products to its portfolio, some of them would be launched simultaneously as in the U.S.
“India is going to be the largest Internet market in the world, after China,” Swaminathan said.
Yahoo has more than 800 million monthly unique users in 60 countries in 45 languages. The company’s homepage has close to 30 million monthly users in India, and reached to about to 50 per cent of the Internet audience in India. “This is expected to grow substantially,” he added.