Re:Sadly, they weren't joking. (Score 1)

Yahoo's, which has no less than 12 panes, including one that's just a graphical advertisement -- oh, yeah, there's a search box around there somewhere, too;

Well, just for laughs I went to see the Yahoo page. By luck I used konqueror and I was pleasantly surprised! Yahoo said:

Why miss out?
To see all the new Yahoo! home page has to offer, please upgrade to a more recent browser.

And it was in a small ahd highly readable page, with a simple and clean search box. Exactly the way I wanted! :-)