A quick look at homepages gives one good reason why Google continues to beat Yahoo as a search engine:

And Google:

Yahoo’s homepage has 50 links just in the screenshot shown.  50 choices – meaning 50 possible decisions – you have to make on their page.

Google has one.  You search for what you’re interested in.

This is one of the most fundamental imaginable lessons in business website design and content creation.  Yahoo, in their effort to be a little of everything, is not great at anything.  They’re a cross between Google, CNN, Twitter, and the local news.

Google is just a search engine.  It’s based on the idea that the user has a specific informational need in mind, and does nothing more than try to fulfill that need.  It’s elegant simplicity at its best.

Google’s own on-page analytics must be the easiest data to decipher on the internet.  Did users understand what to do?  Could they find it?  Was the interface confusing?

With only one possible action, anybody can figure out Google.

Yahoo! apparently still struggles with the concept of decision fatigue, which is the negative psychological reaction we have when confronted with too many choices.   Psychologist Barry Schwartz talks of the anxiety and dissatisfaction decision fatigue causes:

So why don’t more websites simplify?  Often the problem is the ego’s of the people working at the company.  From their perspective, more content is cool.  They’re petrified of being boring.  They want to publish their voice.

But when you’re trying to get website visitors to act, boredom is not the problem.  Confusion and impatience are far worse.

Google does one thing better than almost anyone:  they focus on the needs of webpage user rather than the needs of their business.  A strategy which serves their business goals to perfection.

It’s the most popular website in the world.  The biggest mystery is why more businesses don’t follow their example.