Yahoo and Google Home Pages

By Eric Goldman

Fascinating contraposition of stories on the Google and Yahoo home pages run by the Washington Post and BusinessWeek, respectively.

From BusinessWeek: Yahoo makes its home page decisions strictly by following user clicks. They capture user clickstreams across their site–a total of 10 terabytes of data every day (the same amount of data as the entire Library of Congress). Yahoo learned to focus on clicks rather than simply focus groups after there was a divergence in what users said and what they did. For example, users said they wanted hard news on the home page and not gossip on Britney Spears–but guess where all the traffic went? The solution: give users the hard news as a comfort factor, but don’t expect anyone to click on it.

As an aside, I personally hate Yahoo’s home page. It is just too cluttered and confusing for me, so I stay away from it as much as possible. On the rare occasions that I end up there, I do a control-F search of the page to find the right link rather than playing the Hocus Focus game of trying to find the link amidst the clutter. Of course, if I don’t know what Yahoo calls a particular link, then I’m SOL.

Now, for a different perspective, the Washington Post’ on Google’s home page: Google’s home page goal is to keep it clean. Google even tracks the number of words on the home page–it once was as high as the mid-50s; yesterday it was 33. So every word needs to count. Despite this, Google retains the “I’m feeling lucky” button, even though it gets