The evolution of Yahoo! and Google

Today I found a picture in my mailbox (thanks Paul) showing the evolution of the homepages of Yahoo! and Google.

The comparison illustrates perfectly why I haven’t used Yahoo! since the year 2000. The directory concept for a web portal haven’t ever worked for me, but before 2000 I did use Yahoo! occasionally (as back-up for Altavista).

The picture originates from the John Maeda’s weblog Simplicity, in a post called “Simplicity is about staying simple“. Although the article itself dates from September 2005, I still find it useful to refer to it since I didn’t find that many other referrals.

Luke Wroblewski (Yahoo!) argues that the comparison is not entirely fair, since Google and Yahoo! have different goals. Google is a search engine, whereas Yahoo! is much more a ‘directory of online information’. He rightly comments that homepages and “their ease of use cannot be judged on visual simplicity alone”.

True as this may be, the proposition of Yahoo! is too broad for me (a little bit of everything), while Google’s is very evident. To me, the ultimate difference between Google and Yahoo (as a starting point for finding information on the web) is this: I find Google simple, Yahoo! cluttered.

Last year, Jared Spool explained that people call a page ‘cluttered’ if it’s full with irrelevant information, whereas a page full with relevant information is considered ‘handy’. So for many people, Yahoo! may be the best web portal there is, with a little news, gossip, trends, services, deals, weather and search. Just not for me.