Yahoo's homepage has always been of the portal style. When I see people's homepages (friends, family) they're never Google but some sort of portal (whether it's

Yahoo's homepage has always been of the portal style. When I see people's homepages (friends, family) they're never Google but some sort of portal (whether it's a social news aggregator (Digg, reddit), an actual news network or one of the 'classic' web portals (MSN, Yahoo)). I think this is because when people start up their browser they're looking for new stuff. Sure, while Google certainly profits from keeping its homepage clean (it can serve it much faster than any other search engine) I don't think that these ongoing comparisons between the two sites are worthwhile. One is aiming to be a search engine, one is aiming to be a portal (yes, with a search utility), at the end of the day they both follow completely different design routes.