Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Yahoogle!

Simplicity is about staying simple.

Today I was asked by Jessie Scanlon of Business Week regarding the difference between the design of Google and Yahoo! So, I fired up the the all-seeing eye of archive.org to look way back in the past. In short, a lot happened and nothing happened. I captured the evolutionary process in some thumbnails I collected and arranged in the image above (which has a larger version if you click on it). The top row is the evolution of Yahoo! and the bottom row is Google. I had forgotten that Yahoo! came first. As you can see from the thumbnail, in 1996 Yahoo! looked not so much different from Google. And then in 1997 the once familiar two-column approach emerged. Around 2000 everything got terribly complex. Meanwhile, in 2000 Google emerged from Beta with an uncharacteristically complex masthead that announced opportunities to join Google, at which time some talented engineering folks really did "get lucky" I guess.

From 2000 onward, Google declared themselves as the simplicity-themed search engine and they've managed to maintain their position by literally keeping it simple. Which is why in 2005 we "google" things on the Web more often than we "yahoo!" things. Only time will tell if this is always to be the case. Considering how if I google simplicity I am the third link, whereas when I yahoo! simplicity I am the second link, I'm not sure which one I favor more. I think that my curator in France would prefer that I go back to preparation for my show so I really don't have to decide at this very moment ...

Posted by maeda at September 6, 2005 07:20 PM