Google Design: Why Google.com Homepage Looks So Simple

Google executive Marissa Mayer, the web giant's twentieth employee and first female engineer, pulled back the curtain Tuesday evening to reveal why Google's stark white homepage looks the way it does.

Mayer, Google's vice president of local, maps and location services, was the gatekeeper of Google.com for more than a decade and helped shape what Google's millions of users see and experience when they search online. Though some have attributed Google's design to Mayer's own tastes, Mayer said Google.com's layout, which has changed little since its inception, owes its stark look to Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his limited knowledge of HTML, a markup language for websites used to assemble text and other content to create webpages.

Mayer said Brin once explained to her why Google's homepage was so blank. When he was first building Google, "We didn't have a webmaster and I don't do HTML," she said he told her.

"He put together the simplest web page he could to test out the search engine back when he was Ph.D. student," Mayer said during an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. "The first version didn't even have search button because the return button worked just fine. We just kind of stumbled into it."

Mayer noted that users were initially befuddled by the plain white page they found on Google.com. It was unlike many websites of the late-1990s that "flashed, revolved, and asked you to punch monkey." People couldn't figure out how to use the search engine because Google.com was so simple.

In Google's first user study, Stanford University students asked to search on Google would sit for 45 seconds staring at their screen, unsure what to click or how to search, Mayer recalled.

"I'd ask them, 'What are you waiting for?'" Mayer said. "They'd say, 'I'm waiting for the rest of it.' The blank homepage was so out of context in 1999 that they were just waiting for the rest of it."

Google needed a way to signal to users that the page was finished loading and ready to be used, Mayer explained. The solution? Putting at the bottom of the Google.com homepage a small copyright notice -- one that serves no legal purpose whatsoever, but functions as a cue that it's OK to start searching the web.

That page now sees so much traffic -- more than a billion unique users a month, according to some estimates -- that placing an ad on Google.com would be in the "eight figure range" per day, according to Mayer.

"It'd probably be one of the most valuable advertisements you could ever get," Mayer said.

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Comments

[raulvas1989]

09:10 AM on 09/02/2012

Hehe, kinda funny in a way - the most visited site was just stumbled into by it's founders who don't do html. So, in a way, it shows that a good product is definitely better then other flashy things.
I just "stumbled" here looking for a way to find about PSD to twitter bootstrap. Creating my own site. So far the only guys I found are PSD to twitter bootstrap
If anybody reads this comment and does know anybody else( I would like to compare) please do post a reply here.

[byderekj]

12:04 PM on 08/02/2012

Now that Marissa is at Yahoo she will hopefully do the same there.

[gus hardeux]

09:54 PM on 03/31/2012

it's true that the simplistic white background is what makes google, well google! However if you are a person that like to customize everything I have found http://chrome-theme.org to offer many HD Google Themes for free and also you can upload your own image to use as a Google Background! Very cool site and worth checking out

[razmakhin]

08:01 PM on 03/28/2012

sometimes knowing less is better than knowing more :)

[JHRayne]

06:51 PM on 03/28/2012

A "home page" button on Chrome would be nice. Maybe then I could enjoy Google's simplistic design better. As it stands, I have to use a different browser, and a different home page. *shrug*

[Alberto Martinez55]

02:07 PM on 03/29/2012

It does have a home button but doesn't display by default. Just go to Wrench>options>basics

From there you should see a "Show Home Button"

[Alberto Martinez55]

02:09 PM on 03/29/2012

It does have one. Under the basic options there is a "Show Home Buton" option.

[hotradiodj]

05:36 PM on 03/28/2012

I have nothing bad to say about Google. In the end, it serves it's purpose.

[DEE RUSH]

03:10 PM on 03/28/2012

I HATE the new Google blog designs. I HATE IT. I want to go back to the old way. How do I do it?

[eXpresso]

01:40 PM on 03/28/2012

How Much An Ad On Google.com Would Cost

where is this article? I clicked the above headline for this.

[pdxist]

04:36 PM on 03/28/2012

See the last two paragraphs. Tens of millions a day.

[hotradiodj]

05:41 PM on 03/28/2012

if i had to put a number on it, i think a small campaign in the US may cost 4-7 million dollars for the day to start.

[jsarets]

12:15 PM on 03/28/2012

Also for performance reasons. During the preceding Yahoo! era of web development (1995-2001), it was typical for over 80% of the page load time to be spent on HTTP requests for images, animated gifs, and other non-text components.

The Google era (2001-2011?) emphasized cleaner text-oriented pages driven by server-side templating with aggressive search engine optimization (SEO) and reliance on content delivery networks such as Akamai for serving images and video with acceptable performance.

We are probably on the verge of a new era of client-side web apps based on sophisticated widget toolkits (e.g. Sencha Touch). This is problematic for Google, because when their crawler bots hit the URLs, they see the code rather than the content.

It's difficult to predict who will define this new era like Google and Yahoo did before. Google is still in the game with ChromeOS, but I have a feeling that ad-supported business models will not be as successful in this next era.

It looks like subscription-based content services are better positioned. Apple might be the most obvious candidate, but the television and movie industries won't deal. They saw what happened to the music industry with iTunes.

That's why my horse is Big Content's favorite web giant: Amazon.

[top10pr]

10:50 AM on 03/28/2012

This is a good story

[JackBlair69]

07:46 AM on 03/28/2012

The Google start page is their only page that isn't gummed up with BS just like every other site out there.

[waldopepper]

05:48 AM on 03/28/2012

"Punch Monkey". Hmm. Sounds dirty.

[azeem nawaz]

04:28 AM on 03/28/2012

Awesome... Very hilarious :)
but genius work done by google!!!

[KPinSEA]

12:43 AM on 03/28/2012

A lesson you wish so many other webmasters would learn.

Simple = great, cluttered = useless.

[Jake Lort]

12:49 AM on 03/28/2012

Same reason Twitter is being successful while Facebook seems to have been put on the backburner.

[KPinSEA]

07:04 AM on 03/28/2012

I will not be surprised if Facebook goes down the same road AOL did -- fantastic early sense of community, then layering more and more attempts to squeeze profits from that community while doing more and more to remove the things that made it popular in the first place, until it's completely useless.