Yahoo YHOO -1.74% on Wednesday morning plans to unveil a much-awaited overhaul to its iconic home page, as Chief Executive Marissa Mayer looks to reverse a long-term decline in the time people spend on many of its sites. The new home page has a stronger emphasis on tailoring the news articles and other content to individual visitora’ personal interests, in part based on their Facebook FB -1.62% accounts. In effect, Yahoo will take information from a person’s Facebook account, such as what their Facebook friends “liked” or “shared” on the social network, and use it to create a special set of constantly-updating news articles on its home page.get on Facebook People will be able to change the kind of articles they see in their “news feed” by clicking on buttons that inform Yahoo that, for instance, they aren’t interested in sports-related news. In order for the new feature to work, Yahoo users must be “signed in” to their Yahoo account and separately allow Yahoo to access their Facebook account. The move builds on Yahoo’s prior efforts at partnering with Facebook, which over the years has taken away a significant amount of Web traffic and online-ad-revenue share from Yahoo. Those who don’t have a Facebook account will still be able to access a large amount of content on the site. Yahoo can customize what someone sees on the page based on their other activities on Yahoo sites, such as articles they previously read, as long as they are signed in to their Yahoo account. In addition, the new home page will allow people to add personalized information such as current local-weather information, stock quotes, horoscopes, or notifications of their friends’ birthdays. Such features are currently available through a service called My Yahoo.facebook proxy In testing, users exposed to the new home page “were engaging a lot more, coming back more frequently,” said Ms. Mayer in an interview. “We spent a lot of time listening to our users about what they want from Yahoo,” she said. She added that the news articles at the top of the home page, which are largely determined by Yahoo’s editorial staff, would stay the same. In the U.S., the Yahoo home page got 114.1 million unique visitors in December of last year, a 4% increase from a year earlier, according to data form research firm comScore Inc. SCOR -2.24% However, important revenue-generating sites such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance experienced double-digit decreases during the same period. The Yahoo home page helps promote many of those other services, so the company is hoping the revamp will benefit those sites as well.unblock facebook Mayer, who joined Yahoo from rival Google GOOG -1.78% in the middle of last year, in December redesigned Yahoo Mail and said Tuesday that it has led to a 10% increase in daily active users. She also has hired a number of new top executives and made four small acquisitions in order to add talent to Yahoo’s ranks. The company’s revenue, the vast majority of which comes from selling ad space on its sites, has been flat or declining in recent years. http://www.myfbproxy.com/facebook-the-coming-social-media-outrage http://www.myfbproxy.com/facebook-australian-radio-station-says-no-wrongdoing-in-royal-prank-call http://www.myfbproxy.com/facebook-helps-fbi-bust-cybercriminals-blamed-for-%24850-mln-losses