While I was doing some research about the history of the web, I realized that Yahoo! has a unique place in being able to judge that culture. Unlike many popular sites from the past, it still exists (even if it is less popular now than its alternatives.) It goes back as far as the internet archive does, meaning that we get a good look into the past. For the purposes of history it is useful that it doesn't have a clean and simple homepage like Google made popular. This allows us to get a sense of how it was used by just looking at the front page. Thus I thought it would be fun to look at snapshots of the homepage taken through the internet archive, and see how things changed year by year.
The internet archive only goes back to 1999 for screenshots, so let's start with some pictures of Yahoo! before that that I found here and there. First, from 1994 (taken from Wikipedia):
Nice and basic. It's a directory, so you've got a variety of categories you can look into to find websites. Nothing more and nothing less, though note that there are already over 20,000 sites in the directory, making it more comprehensive than alternatives. For 1995, I found a random image online that was unsourced, so I don't know who or where this comes from (and I guess I can't technically verify that this is from 1995, but it seems plausible):
There's a lot to point out here. First, we have some actual organization rather than being a mere list, together with images. (Though note that there is still a text-only mode; after all most people were on dial-up). We have a search. I believe this was a search only of the curated pages and would remain this way for a while, but there was a lot to look through so a search would still be helpful. We have sponsoring by snapple, since Yahoo was now a legitimate business trying to make a profit. And we already have the start of a "start page" type environment, with an option to read news headlines.