There’s a mean, lean version of the Yahoo! homepage. If you pull up search.yahoo.com in a web browser, you’ll get a bare-bones page with no ads. It’s even got the nifty little trick to put the cursor in the search box.
The total page weight (HTML + Images + JavaScript) comes in at 10.3K, which is actually lighter than www.google.com (12.3K). Both of these load faster than the 33K www.yahoo.com home page if you’re using a 56K modem.
Now, if only there was a way to skip the banner ads in the search results…
There is, it’s called privoxy (www.privoxy.org) … sweet ad banner and content filtering proxy. filters based on URL, based on behavior, based on image size, you name it. Definitely worth playing with.
I can’t remember the last ad-banner I saw, on any site. 🙂
Just spoof your UserAgent. Works like a charm. 🙂