A key difference is how the two companies approached their nichification. Yahoo took a kitchen-sink approach——trying to cram every category link into its homepa

A key difference is how the two companies approached their nichification. Yahoo took a kitchen-sink approach——trying to cram every category link into its homepage, in the process transforming itself into a cluttered mess, and ultimately defeating its core purpose as a search engine: to make things easy to find. Google, on the other hand, kept its homepage relatively clean and simple. It held to the belief that the search query should be the point of entry in any session, and that nothing should stand between the user and her query. Basically, Google never tried to become a portal. The SERPs may have changed dramatically over the years, but the starting point is (more or less) the same. "It's in my maps and my phone and my TV and my car; it's everywhere." That's because various devices are supplanting the web browser as points of entry into the internet under specific circumstances. Google's integration into those apps and devices is its attempt to maintain its position as the internet's de facto user interface. (It's also a good way to collect and organize information from the ever-growing, ever-diverging set of sources generating information.) Whichever way the internet goes, Google needs to go with it.