It reminds me of the “portal” era of Netscape, Excite and Yahoo. Very information dense. Among others’, Google’s minimalism took over.

It would not surprise me that Yahoo Japan was the blueprint for many of these sites. It still is extremely popular as a portal destination.

There are still a few information dense English language sites out there, but they’re rarer. Honorable mentions:

- https://based.cooking/ (or the more updated fork https://publicdomainrecipes.com/)

- https://ooh.directory/

- https://gwern.net/

- https://www.metafilter.com/

- HN :)

(These are primarily text and lack the occasional color pop of the Japanese style, but I still admire the density and efficiency.)

I felt like part of Google's success was that the simple search bar loaded fast in an era where I often had slow internet. Yahoo's portal page had to much on it to distract or slow me down from doing what I came there to do.

Later on I remember finding out Yahoo had a search.yahoo.com page or something that was also just a search bar but that was harder to type so was still a failure of design.

This was before combined search and address bar.