Still Seeking a Site to Call Home

By Leslie Walker
Thursday, March 23, 2006

I'm an Internet bag lady, with no place online to call home.

I'd love a single page I could use to unify my life on the Web. But I can't seem to find one that feels truly useful, the Internet equivalent of, say, a newspaper front page or TV evening newscast to serve as my home page every time I launch my browser.

I started thinking about this recently as Yahoo began testing a new look for its front page ( http://www.yahoo.com ) with a random group of users. As you might imagine, Yahoo is going slow in rolling out its redesign to make sure it's done right. After all, it's the most-used home page on the Internet, according to Web measurement firms.

In addition to making its lucrative search box more prominent, Yahoo is cleaning up the clutter on its new page, adding more fresh content and improving its navigation so people can find what they want inside Yahoo faster. "With the new design and new visuals, we are hoping it actually has a better emotional attachment," said Ash Patel, Yahoo's chief product officer.

I am not wild about Yahoo's new home page, though I like its look and have long thought that Yahoo showed the greatest programming flair among the portals. The Yahoo makeover I've seen shows a distressing bias toward fluffy celebrity and entertainment fare, as if Yahoo is taking a page out of the People magazine playbook used by America Online. Serious news headlines get dropped lower, below a new feature box showcasing mostly soft news.

So I doubt I'll be making Yahoo my home base again, though it was my very first home page a decade ago. The reality is, I've been a serial home-page hopper for years, trying out one site after another.

Part of the problem is that the Web evolves so fast it's hard to find a place that doesn't morph in distressing ways every few months. But the bigger issue may be that no one has really nailed the art of programming for the hyperactive online audience.

That's why I closely watch the programming experiments going on at Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. Each takes a distinctive approach. If I were writing taglines for style, here's what I'd say about their forays:

Yahoo: Hollywood Goes to the Web

Google: Attack of the Robots

Microsoft: Lost in Cyberspace

The reason for Yahoo's is obvious -- it has been steadily adding entertainment fare throughout its network (beefing up music and video, for example) so it should surprise no one that the front-page redesign leans that way. Still, Yahoo has other programming changes in the works that have yet to be revealed, such as tying together all the social networking and social-media services it's been building and buying. I expect these will bubble up to the home page in clever ways soon.

Google, meanwhile, doesn't program its home page, unless you count those cutesy logo redesigns honoring holidays. Yet Google has been adding services that mimic Yahoo's, most recently a financial news section. Like most of Google, it is assembled by automated software programs dubbed "bots," rather than the human editors that guide Yahoo's programming.

And since Google offers little but a search box on its home page, it lets users customize that page to present headlines on their favorite topics, along with traffic conditions, weather reports and similar features from other sites. Both Microsoft and Yahoo, by contrast, shuttle that personalization feature off to separate pages because their home pages are already filled with programming and internal links.

Yahoo, you may recall, pioneered this "Daily Me" concept when it first let people create pages reflecting their preferences a decade ago. Its popular "My Yahoo" page pulls about half as many monthly visitors as its home page. Patel said people who use My Yahoo tend to be advanced surfers looking for a dashboard to monitor their Web activity, while home-page regulars tend to want utility, such as links to Yahoo services.

Of the three, Microsoft appears to be the least focused, which is why I consider it "Lost in Cyberspace." I find it funny that Microsoft offers not one but three different flavors of personal pages, as if the software giant can't make up its mind what it wants to be online. Its main offering has been "My MSN," where users can create a custom view of the heavily programmed MSN network alongside material from other sites. But Microsoft also has rolled out an experimental version of a similar page called Start ( http://www.start.com ) and a third version as part of its new Windows Live service ( http://www.live.com ).

The Live page is the one to watch, because Microsoft hopes people will use it as their dashboard to control the many Web services it has under development. I know it's still in beta testing, but my attempts to customize Windows Live have been disastrous. My browser crashed repeatedly and big blank gaps appeared in place of headlines.

In the past, Yahoo and MSN have let users modestly tweak their front pages but never gave them total control like Google does. No doubt the portals feel obliged to devote most of their home-page real estate to helping people find what's available inside their network, the better to sell ads.

Yet I find both Yahoo and MSN do a lousy job of promoting even their own stuff, typically linking to thinly veiled advertorials such as beach polls in Yahoo's advertising-heavy Travel section or -- on MSN yesterday -- a directory of educational degree programs in the Microsoft Encarta area.

If they really want to goose readership and aren't willing to relinquish control to users, then Yahoo and MSN should hire teams of savvy editors and give them freedom to tout whatever they want on those home pages, including material published elsewhere on the Web.

Such human programming might show the bots over at Google who's really boss.

Leslie Walker welcomes e-mail atwalkerl@washpost.com.