Yahoo! Opens Up Home Page To Outsiders

Anyone who visits the Yahoo! website frequently may have noticed how every story, article, or link on the home page leads visitors to yet another Yahoo! page.

Today, however, that has changed as Yahoo! has begun including links to outside content. No visual changes or anything immediately noticeable, but the external links provided by editors are now there.

This is a first for the web portal and has been done as part of the company's move towards “openess” and helping Yahoo! be the “front door” to the internet for those who use it.

The only section excluded from containing outside links is the Featured section at the top of the page. Within the other section, visitors will likely find themselves traveling to other websites for news and other items.

“We are the only one of the old portals to do that,” stated Yahoo! executive Tapan Bhat. “We are linking to the best stuff around the Web.”

Elinor Mills or Webware has reported that Yahoo! linked to Forbes, NASA, TIME, and The Wall Street Journal during testing of the outside availability, “but could link to any site on the Web.” Also, possibly taking a cue from Techmeme, Yahoo! may feature links to smaller website as 'Related Links' rather than 'Top Stories' to keep from inundating such sites with traffic that may bog them down, according to Bhat.

After visiting for myself, the only place where I found external links was under the 'Local' tab, as seen in the screenshot below. Here there were links to Dallas Morning News, Star-Telegram, my local CBS station, and even Plano Star-Courier (my city's local newspaper). Elsewhere on the page I failed to find any other outside links, advertising not included, of course.

Last week, in a conference call, Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang cited a new goal at the company to “become the starting point for most consumers on the Internet,” and this looks to be the first move, however minor it may seem. Let's just hope that Yahoo! is making bigger plans than providing a few external links to become that starting point, though.