I count it as a major advantage of the page design, and it follows what I've heard and read about good navigation being designed into web sites. The drop-down menus require a second click and two additional eye movements. Instead of a nice cluster and direct linkage, one has to choose among three buttons to get to the link. There's nothing more frustrating to me than to be offered a choice of just two or three buttons, rather than just going directly to the broader range of choices that lie beyond them. They waste time.
Web pages offer two advantages over just using a search engine.
The other is context. A phase or a sentence or the collection of links give you a context for selecting what you want. I've always felt that FinanceNet as it is does this extremely well. By using the left margin for clusters of shortcuts, you provide both context and speedy direct access to relevant material. Of course, if you want to hold people on a page or to limit where they go next, you make navigation more difficult, requiring more steps.