people now don't seem to appreciate how much Google's radically simple homepage changed the web
look at web design right before Google took off - it was always about adding more to the page, and most sites were a mess
Larry and Sergey showed that radical simplicity was literally worth a trillion dollars
for example...they could have dropped some links below the search bar to some homegrown sports site they set up...and that would have become the most popular sports site...its hard for most people to resist that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
Google's simplicity and clarity became part of the brand. No one else was doing that at the time. Even "efficient" designs were maximalist, so extreme minimalism with a splash of colour was a real innovation.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19980423064646/http://altavista....