Yahoo! UK lets the people speak

Aims to provide the quick and authoritative poll

Yahoo! UK, (www.yahoo.co.uk) the leading web navigational service for British users, has teamed up with Online Magic's GE97 and CompuServe to let the wired public share their views on key issues in the run-up to the election.

Yahoo! UK and Online Magic have created the Yahoo! UK Polling Booth at the General Election site GE97 (www.ge97.co.uk), where the electorate can make its opinion known on a range of key issues crucial to the outcome of the forthcoming General Election. Would you be willing to pay a further 2 pence in the pound in taxes if it was to be spent on education? Do you believe the politicians when they promise not to raise taxes after the election? If you were to vote today which party, if any, would you support? These and many more questions will be put to an audience of hundreds of thousands of users, starting March 17th.

In addition to displaying the results of this rolling poll online in real time, the polling booth will also show demographic variations in responses, such as the percentage of women who believe that the State Earning Related Pension Scheme should be abolished by the future government and the percentage of under 25s planning to vote.

"The poll will be accessible from the home page of Yahoo! UK, which receives tens of thousands of unique visits per day," said Ralph Averbuch, Producer for Yahoo! UK & Ireland. " The anticipated volume of people taking part should make the results of the poll highly reliable. Responses will be instantaneously available from the Yahoo! UK home page from now until polling day. We'll also be considering questions which the media would like us to ask in the run-up to the election." [See Editors Note]

About Yahoo!

The European directories are part of a developing global family of Yahoo!-branded media properties for targeted geographic (Yahoo! Japan, UK, France, Germany, Canada, San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Boston, Austin, TX, Seattle and Dallas/Fort Worth); interests (Yahoo! Internet Life magazine and website and MTV/Yahoo!'s online music guide); and demographic audiences (Yahooligans!, a Web guide for kids and a women's oriented service with Women's Wire). Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), offers a globally-branded Internet navigational service to information and entertainment on the Web. As the first online guide to the Web, Yahoo! is one of the most visible and recognizable names associated with the Internet. Yahoo! provides a context-based directory structure for Internet resources, as well as integrated AltaVista Web-wide search capabilities.Yahoo! can be found on the web at www.yahoo.com. Yahoo! Inc. headquarters are in Santa Clara, California. In Europe Yahoo! is headquartered in London with offices in Paris and Munich. Yahoo! UK & Ireland can be found at www.yahoo.co.uk.

Online Magic, founded in 1991, is the premier Web services company in the UK. Blue-chip clients include Channel 4 Television, Viacom, Boots the Chemists, and The Economist. With design studios and production centres in London and New York, the company employs over 40 talented new media professionals comprised of interactive graphic artists, software engineers along with creative and technical directors.

General Election 97 (www.ge97.co.uk) is an Online Magic production supported by Yahoo! UK & Ireland, CompuServe UK and PA News.