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.