Word has it that Yahoo hopes to win over Wall Street by emphasising its human side in a round of presentations to analysts today.

For example, the internet company’s redesigned homepage, revealed overnight, includes a feature called Yahoo Pulse. It monitors users’ search habits to provide lists of the most popular pieces of content, thus bringing them to an even wider audience.

"Traditional search is good for finding stuff but not so good for discovering stuff," Jon Gisby, Yahoo Europe’s head of media, told Times Online. "We’re redressing that by building people and not just numbers into the search equation."

Such comments are firmly rooted in the "Web 2.0" movement, the vaguely defined (but modish) set of websites that have embraced ways of letting users make and share content.

But it's hard not to read them also as implicit digs at Google, which relies entirely on mathematical formulae to prioritise content. The problem is, Wall Street likes numbers - especially if they're rising as quickly as Google's search-derived revenues.

Search remains the key

"Yahoo’s Analyst Day represents an important step in conveying to investors it has not become complacent in its maturity," Deutsche Bank, which has a buy recommendation on Yahoo’s shares, said.

"Hopefully it's still 'MyYahoo', and not just 'MyFather'sYahoo'."

As far as investors are concerned, if Yahoo wants to prove it’s still hip, it has to demonstrate momentum in the search and online advertising markets.

In its curtain raiser for today's presentations, Deutsche concentrated on this part of Yahoo's business, and said it would look for indications on how the company intends to boost revenues in a market where it trails Google by some margin.

Google accounts for around half of the online search advertising market - where advertisers pay to have their site appear at the head of a list of results when certain keywords are typed into a search engine - way ahead of Yahoo's 22 per cent share.

In particular, investors are hoping for an update on Yahoo’s plans to roll out an entirely revamped online search advertising system this autumn.

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