The New BBC homepage

Some of you will by now have seen the new BBC home page with its movable and customisable sections which can be tailored to your preferences. Fiddleability rules!

When I first looked at the beta version I wasn’t convinced; it looked a bit “play-school” and some of the option weren’t too well thought out. But it’s now much better and if you reduce the text size a notch it fits together pretty well to give you a selection of news items of the sort you want without the stuff you dont.

I can see this becoming the defalt home page for a lot of people, and maybe not just those in the UK either!  Depite the seemingly universal dumbing down all over the media the public still trust the BBC in a way that applies to very few other organisations. So the question is, will this take some traffic away from Google?

I suspect it might, particularly if the search facility was made more prominent and the “All the Web” option promoted a bit more. It’s ages since I tried any competitive searches on this engine – in fact I’d forgotten if it was still their own engine or if they were using someone else’s results – but I tried a few queries today and was quite pleased with the results. (they must be good, I was in the top ten for “search engine optimisation scotland” 😉  ) If I have time I’ll try and remember to do a few more and compare them to Google and Yahoo.

If the BBC really wanted to push this I suspect they could get a reasonable share of the market. Who do you trust more – MSN, Ask, or good old Auntie Beeb? Well, that’s third place pretty well assured then! Of course what they would be allowed to do with it is another matter; they can hardly start up a BBC adwords-style operation can they?

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