Yahoo is planning another redesign; and it’s already happening. In keeping with others such as social micro-blogging site Twitter – which started to implement a phased series of changes to its site design last week – Yahoo; allegedly the most heavily-trafficked site on the internet, is already moving ahead with redesigning its home page. The changes are to be initially tested on a small group of users in alpha form, and will eventually move on up through beta, to a full-scale overhaul at a later date.

Yahoo plans to invite a random sample of of around 1% of its audience to test the alpha upgrades. The tests will be conducted in Britain, France, India and the United States, according to a Yahoo executive.

Tapan Bhat; senior vice-president in charge of “front doors” – The main destinations at Yahoo, such as Yahoo.com. My Yahoo, and the Yahoo Toolbar – explained that the last redesign two years ago took six months to fully implement. Yahoo are aiming to deliver on past promises from around a year ago. “We are going to put what matters to you most at your fingertips” Explains Bhat.

The new Yahoo home page will feature a tab on the left hand column of the page with  links to the user’s favourite sites. It functions as an alternative to navigation methods such as bookmarks, link bars, and browser tabs.

“For the first time, we are going to marrying Yahoo.com and MyYahoo to take the best of both,” Bhat promises.

Yahoo is using a new technology it calls the Content Optimisation Knowledge Engine to enable its computers to determine what the most engaging content may be to a specific user, and to present that, combined with relevant advertising tied to users’ particular interests, to users, based on their prior surfing habits.

Yahoo is taking a rather cautious approach with this personalisation, in the knowledge that less than 15% of its current users subscribe to My Yahoo; its existing personalisation service.

Flickr, a Yahoo company, is already offering some of its pro users in the UK a beta of its new look homepage: This author is currently running the new look Flickr homepage on her Flickr profile.

- Also, as an incidental point, users in the UK subscribed to BT/Yahoo Broadband service are able to sign up for a pro account on Flickr free of charge, provided that, and for as long as, they continue to subscribe to their BT/Yahoo internet services. (That’ll at least partially make up for BT’s Home Hub 2.0 con in a manner of speaking perhaps?)

Have you started to trial Yahoo’s new designs; and if so what do you think of them?