That's not fair, they could easily have overloaded the home page with junk at any point. They just realised that users came to google to perform a single, clea

That's not fair, they could easily have overloaded the home page with junk at any point. They just realised that users came to google to perform a single, clearly defined task and decided the home page should reflect that. I wouldn't argue it was "respect for minimalism" but it was respect for functional simplicity.