Crikey! What if any website looked like that?
Serious link overload! |
Took me a while to find the main content :-) |
Very Web 1.0. And to think Adventnet is the company behind the continuing Zoho series of Web 2.0 apps! |
Hey Philipp, is that the Yahoo! homepage photoshopped? ;) |
if it looked like that, i switch asap to ask.com. |
Yahoo, that's first thing I thought of. Brings back memories of excite and iwon with everything on the homepage.
The question then is would google have achieved such success even with it's far superior search technology if it had presented itself just like the other players at the time (and yahoo still does today)? I would guess they wouldn't have received the same amount of ground swell of support from the online community as the clean look and feel and the quick results were what made it a popular recomendation. They were all about search, not horoscopes or hollywood gossip. That would come later with all the other products , but not on the homepage that's sacred ground. Another aspect that I often forget is that not everyone surfs with a T3 connetion, some still use 56k, which google also shines on today as it did back in '99. |
heck I switched from a 33.6 to DSL in 2002. |
Johnweb, would Google have had the same impact with a portal + PageRank algo? I don't think so. From my own perspective... when I switched away from AltaVista, I didn't actually do it because of search results, which I'm sure were terrible by today's standards... I did it because they started to have popups and more and more clutter! I think many people were growing tired of portals. |
Philipp, agreed, the clean interface was probably very important in the meteoric rise in google.
I think the downfall of the portal is the information overload it presents the user with. Too much to choose from so they don’t choose anything. I’ve found that people are willing to click quite deep into a site with the right direction and structure. It’s like playing 20 questions with the user, you can pretty much nail down anything with twenty questions and you can get them to one of thousands of pages with a few clicks. Google understood that from the beginning and it helped them succeed.
Now let’s bring this full circle to today. I’ve seen a lot of web sites go the other direction with 100’s of links on the homepage so everything is one click away, it can’t be for the user experience as I know I’m not going to read through a 100 links to find what I want. It’s in reaction to pages going supplemental and the perception that a page 3 clicks down has so little page rank passed to it that is supplementalized. Part of this of course is because we are used to a google search being so good that we are sent to the right page from the search results. Site navigation from the home page is suffering because of it.
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It is Yahoo.com photoshoped. You can see a "My Yahoo!" link. |
Simple, Cheap and Powerful is the sprite of Google. I love simple, cheap and powerful GOOGLE! |