The simplicity was nice, but people switched to Google because of PageRank.
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....