[kagamine]

> That was built by engineers not by designers or by UX guys who do "research"

Except that what Google did was look at existing search engines and think 'how can we differentiate?' and the result was an (originally) ad-free, no links to other services site. They stripped all the bad design from thier industry competitors and left a service in which the new or naive user was in no doubt about what to do there. No distractions, no fiddling, no - anything except full focus on Google Search.

The search results are what you get after you use the search functionality, that those results were good could be argued as secondary to what got users to switch from Yahoo, Ask Geeves etc in the first place.