Yahoo News gets a makeover: now personalized

The more you read, the more your newsfeed is tailored to your tastes

You know what, you guys? I think Yahoo’s gonna be okay. I really do. I was worried for a while, but Marissa Mayer…she’s a good kid, that one.

Following along in its Operation: Yahoo Makeover mission, Yahoo unveiled its brand spankin’ new News page Thursday. The Yahoo News redesign now gives the page a more modern, intuitive feel, but more importantly, it’s designed to learn your interests and serve up the news you want to read most.

“The first thing that you’ll notice about the new Yahoo! News is that it was designed around your interests and preferences,” wrote Yahoo’s VP of Product, Mike Kerns, in a blog post. “We made the news stream customizable so you can tell us what content you’d like to see more of.”

He added: “This new design is one step towards creating a more consistent feel across Yahoo!.”

When you sign in with your Yahoo ID and read the news, the site learns your preferences and personalizes your newsfeed. And the more you use it, the more precisely personalized it will become—which in itself isn’t entirely new. Personalized news aggregators like Pulse, Zite, and Flipboard have been doing it for a while. But Yahoo News has a huge audience. Last month, more people got their news from Yahoo than any other online news source, according to comScore. The combined Yahoo-ABC News Network reached 89 million people in May.

Yahoo is also a one-stop shop for pretty much everything: email, photo sharing (Flickr), mobile, and more. And Mayer and team are doing a pretty solid job of rebuilding the Yahoo brand to align it more closely with social and mobile. So in essence, you go to Yahoo and you stay at Yahoo.

The move falls in line with Yahoo’s strategy of personalization, which Marissa Mayer touched on earlier this year with the home page redesign.

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

At that time, Yahoo News was updated with infinite scroll. Additionally, it was made more social by allowing users to sign in via Facebook to see what articles friends are reading and sharing.

Articles also load faster and news categories are easier to navigate.

And of course, in keeping with Yahoo’s mobile strategy, the Yahoo News redesign also extends to mobile devices (first iOS, and later Android).

Last October, Mayer said that Yahoo had made progress on the mobile front, but it wasn’t enough since Yahoo still had no optimized site for mobile. The brand had been splintered across 76 different apps across iOS and Android.

“All of this needs to change. Our top priority is a focused, coherent mobile strategy," said Mayer.