In fact, that's how Google got their initial foot in the proverbial door - by being just a search engine, and presenting a clean landing page with essentially j

In fact, that's how Google got their initial foot in the proverbial door - by being just a search engine, and presenting a clean landing page with essentially just the search textbox, at the time when incumbents (Yahoo, Altavista, ...) had their landing pages crowded with news and advertisements so much that the actual search box would get lost in there.