A number of new features have made their bow on the revamped MSN homepage, which made its first official appearance today.

Five months after the first sneak previews appeared, the new look previewed boasts a much more stripped-back appearance, with white replacing the previous blue background.

The choice of content on the homepage takes most of its cues from structured Bing data, which among other things, will inform the choice of local news which appears.

About 45 per cent of Bing’s traffic is estimated to come through the MSN homepage, so it is hardly surprising that the new site ‘front door’ includes many pointers to it.

MSN joins a raft of major new homepage roll-outs in recent months, which have included Yahoo!, AOL and, in the UK, TalkTalk, the new identity of the former Tiscali ISP.

The MSN creation contains a number of options to create a personalised front page, including ‘My Cities’, which lets users customise MSN Local Edition and at the same time save details of up to three other locations to follow; Hyper-local Tweets, which highlights posts on the Microblogging site again relevant to the user’s home areas; and TrendWatch, again a ‘Twitter-watching’ application which flags up the day’s top trends and biggest movers.