Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and Twitter are among the most visited websites in the world. Google and Yahoo were founded in the 1990s whereas Facebook and Twitter were founded in the mid 2000s. While Google has retained its focus on search, Yahoo! shifted from search to focus more attention on its web services. Facebook and Twitter were founded at a time when social networking was taking off and would come to dominate much of the time people spent online.
From a design perspective, websites have transformed from those that wanted to display the wide variety of information and services they offered, to websites that now exhibit minimalism. The minimalistic nature of these websites can be attributed to the fact that Google, Facebook and Twitter are globally recognized brands, and thus don’t need to show who they are and what they offer, since people visiting these websites already know.
