Do You Remember When Google Started? Viva La Google
Do you remember Google online in 1998 at Standford? The implementation was plain Jane and the page total was 25 million!! Can you imagine? When you type in the word "Sports" today you receive "Results 1 - 100 of about 59,000,000 for sports." WOW!
Needless to say Google's growth is phenominal as of September 2005 Google's page count was 8,168,684,336. Considering daily blogs, podcasts, videocasts and normal webpages this number must have exploded this year.. (Still researching a real number)
GOOGLE PAGE 1998 above produces the image to the right when clicking on the Google Search Engine Prototype. This was the proto-type notice BETA is not at the bottom right of the Google! icon.
One thing to note is there are no ads on Google's home page. Zip, nada, not-a-one. This holds true in 2006. What we find today is a lot of competition changing this rule to much of my dismay. A search tool should just be 1 line of text input with a button (or an enter key] and memonics to do kool techie stuff. Of course providing just easy to use queries and a low barrier of entry of understanding in the same interface is a must!! Google commits this from year to year to year!! Google is simple, clean and a useful tool.
Yahoo, has always and continues to appear cluttered. It could be simply that a clean fast tool such as Google is all we are looking for and Yahoo and all the other search engines are just to cluttered.
Yahoo's 1998 look was is a little busy and had one ad at the bottom. This is not much different today and still provides results that are reasonable. I can basically find anything I am looking for with realtive ease.
YAHOO 1998 
Plus two years in the running very little advertising as people thought this search thing was a toy. As you can see, VISA thought it had value. The advertising models were in a birthing period and usually seen on homsites and with in the search results.
Surely Yahoo and the other search engines got the idea, it was the customers that needed to catch up.
YAHOO 1996
The pioneering years were just beginning and search was way kool and techie... Not one ad on the front page. Obviously in both cases there we ads in the listings as SAP, MASTERCARD and DALTEK amognst others that were Yahoo customers at this time.It seemed the two search engines that got most of the attention were Excite and Yahoo. I know, I know, MSN, LYCOS, and several others.However, Excite and Yahoo where the busiest clutter in erms of format and I just did not like that mess on my home screen. I found Google to be and still to be, simple and results based. Its still my home screen. Thanks to Firefox I don't have to set it on every new computer I traverse. :-)Though I used Yahoo it still was too busy. The category breakdowns was too slow to peruse.. Just give me a command line and let me go....If the truth be known, that little entry box to the left floating about my browser is all I really need for a search interface. Do you remember Shred The Web?
GOOGLE 1998 UPDATED
Viva La Google!