Growing up in both New Zealand and Taiwan, where one of the co-founders of “Yahoo” is from, I have noticed something interesting about this incredibly useful site.
The Yahoo search engine is no doubt one of the first and largest search engines that was brought to the world in the early stages of internet development. When Yahoo was first introduced, it pretty much impacted anybody who used the internet. It was one of the first sites where there was a little box where you were able to search for anything you wanted. In the beginning, not only did it include this magical little box where people could search for information, it also had a feature where one is able to sign up for a totally free e-mail account that allowed people who didn't have Outlook or Hotmail to also have an email account.
Yahoo has a homepage for a county in that language for almost every county in the world. The largest differences between these homepages are of course the language it it written in. But the main focus here will be on the New Zealand Yahoo homepage. When clicked into the page, and taking a first glance, the slide-show in the MIDDLE of the page grabs your attention right away. The slide-shows are daily relevant news from New Zealand to global wide. And to the left of the slide-show, there is a whole bar of categories where you can choose and search for whatever you'd like. It is easy to conclude that this website is not only for daily news, but probably mostly for entertainment
This short, simple, clear, and orderly layout of news and categories is probably what makes this site so loved (Steven, 2011). Of course, the order of the news are according the magnitude of the news, and the categories on the left are according to alphabetical order. Although the site gives very simple headlines and everything is clear, the pictures on the New Zealand Yahoo homepage are not very eye catching. In comparison with the Taiwan Yahoo site, the New Zealand Yahoo page is not attractive at all. In the New Zealand page, there are only pictures of relevant news. But in the Taiwan Yahoo page, not only does it include pictures of relevant news, it also includes a section called the “Yahoo Auction” where the New Zealand page does not include this feature. In this Auction section, there are pictures of what items are on sale, and whats new. And if you keep scrolling down in the Taiwan Yahoo site, there are tabs where you only need to hover your cursor over and more pictures of celebrities, movies, or food. Basically there is a tab section with pictures about the categories I have mentioned earlier that are located on the left side of the New Zealand Yahoo site.
Why are these two same sites so different? This difference is made on purpose by Yahoo. The purpose of this is because New Zealand and Taiwan have different customer needs. Apparently, Taiwanese people pay more attention to the pictures rather than the words, and also have a high capacity to consume. Whereas in New Zealand, people are more concerned about news, sports, and travel. This culture difference is greatly shown simply by the difference of these two sites. Thus, the purpose and layout of the same Yahoo site may have some small deviations.
All in all, what I am impressed by the site is it's dedication through observation. Yahoo makes small or large changes according to their group of consumers. This is why Yahoo is such a success. It pays attention to what its customers needs are, and tries to fulfill them as best as they can. This incredibly successful site has brought a large amount on convenience to our lives. It is definitely a site that needs to stay alive until another more powerful site appears.
