Google Dashboard v My Yahoo!

Great new things are afoot, with Web 2.0 taking shape (although nobody has a clue what it actually is), the good side winning over the dark side in the long running browser wars and Google taking over the World.

Unless you are 16 or have spent the last 10 years in the remote desert, you probably remember that web-portals were all the rage back in the late 90s. After a decent amount of crashing and burning shortly after, we all thought things would mature and the hype die down finally. Hold that tought because it appears that the survivers of the great search engine wars are running out of ideas, so they are re-heating the same old junk that a lot of people found not-so-very-exciting even when it was first brand new.

Check out the all new My Yahoo! and give Google’s Personalised Startpage (or Dashboard as I like to call it) a try. It’s the same old concept of cramming a lot of content into a single page. Now all this seems even easier thanks to RSS. Google allows you to simply pull your listings from anywhere with an RSS feed. Yahoo counters with top-class content from the major news and entertainment providers, plus a lot of other goodies (like cartoons for example). Yahoo offers the use of RSS / XML feeds as well.

Google being Google, I find their Dashboard easy, fast loading and it does what it says on the box in a professional manner. My Yahoo on the other hand, which used to be my startpage of choice a few years ago, does what it did back than: confuse, clutter and generally be hard to use as much as hard on the eye.

Where Google uses fantastically easy to use AJAX containers which can be dragged and dropped around the page, Yahoo! requires users to go through a submenu page and then some. Google’s clean, sometimes a little bland design works especially well with loads of content on the page. You simply never get lost.

Yahoo on the other hand offers lots of themes to choose from, none as easy and fast as Googles and sadly their default theme also comes with an eye watering patterned background image.

On the whole I find Google’s Dashboard much easier to use, more grown up and a lot quicker. It’s what I want and need. My favourite links, top five latest news entries from my top three news sources, the weather and some usefull bits on the side.

In my humble opinion My Yahoo! fails even more than it did back in the days. It’s too much clutter, too many options that are even harder to use by being burried under menus and other stuff all over the place.

If you are looking for the worlds best search engine combined with a useful starting page, choose Google. If you have too much time on your hands choose My Yahoo.