[asadotzler]

>How did search engines trick us into thinking that our home page should be a search engine?

The browser makers started in the mid-90s with web search and news called "portals", either their own or licensed from a third party. By the early 2000s the portals had all gone to shit but we still needed them for web search because we still cared about the web and not just a couple of social media apps. As a result, Google's pristine search and search results pages became popular. When we were deciding on a Firefox start page in mid-2004, Google search eventually won because it was simple and effective, like the rest of Firefox.

(My proposal to our tiny team at the time was to make Firefox Start a page of instructions on how to easily change the start page to what ever you wanted, but that was reasonably shot down as asking the user to do extra work.)