Google's iconic blank homepage was a mistake — the founders barely knew HTML

In 1997, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were PhD students at Stanford working on a research project called BackRub, which analysed the link structure of the web. The search engine they built was technically superior to competitors like AltaVista and Yahoo — but the founders had almost no experience in HTML, the markup language used to design web pages.

Because they could not build a complex, feature-rich portal like Yahoo's, they simply put a search box on a white page with a few text links. There were no ads, no news, no stock tickers, no weather, no customisation — just a logo and a text field. The design was not a minimalist philosophy; it was a limitation of skill.

The simple design turned out to be a competitive advantage. Yahoo's portal was cluttered with features and took time to load; Google's page loaded instantly and did exactly one thing. Users loved it. The clean, fast-loading page became Google's signature. When Google later introduced text-only ads, they preserved the uncluttered look, and the search box on a white page became the most recognisable design in the history of the web.

Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998. By 2000 it was handling 100 million searches per day, and the homepage design has remained essentially unchanged for over 25 years. The 'mistake' of shipping a page that was not 'finished' — because the founders could not make it more complex — became the defining feature of the world's most visited website.