Too many Chinese characters: Busy web interface

Have you ever noticed how most Chinese websites are choke full of text? When I come to a Chinese website for the first time, I never know what I am supposed to do because there is so much content that I have a difficulty finding the part that brought me there in the first place.

Here is, for example, a section from the website Taobao.com, the Chinese equivalent of eBay. (The real eBay never made it in China, apparently the Chinese preferred their own way of doing online garage sales.) If you click on this image to see the larger version, you can see that it is packed with text. Now I guess a Chinese person will just intuitively ignore the parts he does not need but I need to start reading to see what I need.


A section from the Chinese online auction site Taobao.com.

Or here is another example from one of the top Chinese search engines, Sohu.com. Sohu.com is extremely popular in China and you can do pretty much everything on it, starting from searching the Net and playing online games to trading stocks and buying property.


Characters flooding the page on Sohu.com's main page

Now my question is whether this is completely normal for Chinese users or they would also prefer a much less crowded interface? After all, why would you always want to have on your screen hundreds of words you never look at? I don't need to see "pet food" as a category on my auction site every single time I go there. I really don't because I do not own a pet. Neither am I interested in kitchen utensils, I never ever look at them.

So, going back to my original question, is this tolerable for others? Does it bother anyone else or is it just me?