Google

I read a blog yesterday, though I can't remember where, suggesting google's homepage is poorly designed.

My first thought is this person is moaning about the number of new items on the homepage compared to its more sparse original style. Not so - they were pointing out that google doesn't make it easy to find their "portal" features like GMail.

I have to agree with them. Unless you are a regular visitor to google labs you would struggle to find out things like GMail exist, at least without someone telling you.

I don't think it would hurt google at all to include a selection of links at the top of the page (or the bottom) to things like gmail. It would boost their performance massivly I would expect.

I decided to post this after spotting that Yahoo! portal features are doing much better than their google competitors despite being inferior products with horrible picture adverts everywhere.

To get rid of the adverts in Firefox just use the Adblock extension. It speeds up many sites and makes viewing more appealing.