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Yahoo Mail and its Search engine undergoes a make over
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 27 October 2010, 17:10 IST
Bangalore: Yahoo mail and its search engine will undergo a face lift to enhance its overall performance and the quality of service for its 279 million users. Yahoo mail will have the biggest make over to provide more compatible and faster webmail service. Yahoo will also sharpen its search engine to provide richer results for news and entertainment-related queries.
Yahoo is planning changes to Yahoo Mail as part of a project codenamed 'Minty'. The decision is anticipated to come after researchers at com Score claimed that Yahoo shifts to number three slot in terms of time spent by an average netizen in the U.S. in the month of August 2010.
The top website now is social networking giant Facebook registering a total number of 41.1 million minutes spent by U.S. net surfers which is 9.9 percent of their internet surfing time. It is interesting to note that in August 2009, Yahoo was the top web site with U.S. net surfers spending 12 percent of their online time on the site. The figure does raise alarm bells for Yahoo which is now beaten by Facebook followed by Google Search with 39.8 million surfing minutes spent by U.S. net surfers which is 9.6 percent of their net surfing time. Yahoo registered a total of 37.7 million minutes by a net surfer in the U.S.
The biggest threat posed to the popularity of Yahoo Mail is Google's Gmail which is gaining large popularity especially due to Android powered smartphones. Another threat faced by Yahoo Mail is the advent of latest craze among net surfers called the social networking and Yahoo faces tough competition from social networking giants such as Facebook and Twitter.
Yahoo is also planning to make the look of the service much simpler resembling that of downloadable email app on devices such as Apple's iPhone and handsets that use Android. Project 'Minty', therefore also aims to enable its users manage photos that they get and share with other with the inclusion of elements like Yahoo's Flickr photo sharing and photo editing features. Yahoo hopes to gain back its popularity with the revamp of Yahoo Mail.
As far as search engine is concerned yahoo will make search results for topics like movies, music and news more visually compelling and and contain richer information via increased use of images, videos, articles and social media site postings.
The Yahoo Mail enhancements will be available as a beta, or test, version in the coming weeks, according to Yahoo. The search improvements are due sometime soon.