Yeah it is pretty nice and keeping in-line with some of their other redesigns of late (their TV and Sports sections received similar redesign treatments; they’re each a little different, but all look/feel like a ‘new’ Yahoo property.) I’d personally like to see them fully-revamp their Finance section soon (they’ve already done some great things with their stock charts.)

I like the fact that they’re brining in more social aspects as well and lessening the map-central approach. I think Google’s going a little overboard with the maps push, but they also don’t have as much original content of their own yet so that’s only natural I suppose. That might change over time.

Given the very close association between mobile and local content I’ll be interested to see how/if this ever translates over into the mobile space. Yahoo already has some very strong mobile offerings (arguably stronger than Google’s right now) but if the Google phone rumors are true they’re going to need to push extra hard on local/mobile as that’s a booming landscape.

And I agree that nobody’s going to threaten Google’s marketshare anytime soon on search. Yahoo or Microsoft could maybe eat away at the marketshare some, but as long as Google continues to deliver quality results most people will continue to associate Google with search for the forseeable future. It’ll take years for an estalished player like Yahoo or Microsoft to make a lot of headway on that front. Some sort of wiki-based engine might be able to come out of nowhere and make a lot of noise in a short time (the way Wikipedia pops up in seemingly every Google result, Google’s basically telling us we ought to just use Wikipedia instead of them.)

As the recent opinion poll showed, Google’s biggest strength (its no-frills, tool-like nature) could also be its biggest weakness when it comes to driving ‘normal’ people to use their other services. To people like my dad (or even my brother) Google’s simply a tool. Quick and efficient - just what you want in a search engine. Even good for email. But it also doesn’t feel all warm and fuzzy either. There’s no sense of wanting to draw you in to browse, socialize and hang out. That’s one of Yahoo’s biggest strengths and clearly they need to cultivate that.

I’d be surprised if Finance didn’t get some attention. It was, at one point, another of their best portals. But more and more I see folks turning to other services. If Y! was smart they’d get in there now and give it a boost!

I’m not sure Google will ever be able to match Yahoo!’s content stockpile. I hate to say “never”… but short of an acquisition, Google just doesn’t even seem interested in content production. They’d rather just bring everyone else’s content in and repackage it.

I agree that Yahoo!’s current mobile offerings have more going for them than Google’s. But as I’ve said in the past, Yahoo! doesn’t do a good enough job of marketing those offerings to the masses. They use Google on their computers so they don’t even think about trying something different their mobile devices.

And I think you’re right about the Yahoo! “draw in” factor. Yahoo! tries its hardest to keep users going to Yahoo!-produced (or hosted) content… and I think ultimately that will help them. Once someone ends up on Yahoo! they’ll slowly start to realize that they don’t need to leave to do other things.

AOL showed us that people like that (they don’t like AOL’s price or crappy customer service) - but they like having everything in one place.