To add some cynical flavor: when you went to the Google homepage, you expended electricity, CPU cycles, network traffic, gave up some privacy and waited some ti

To add some cynical flavor: when you went to the Google homepage, you expended electricity, CPU cycles, network traffic, gave up some privacy and waited some time just to see something that could have been shown to you by a static HTML file(²) on your disk (or even something built in the browser), because some corporation sees some benefit in all this extra work. We're not exactly trying to do things efficiently these days, since it's no longer a priority. (²) not valid for search results of course, but even they could be sent to you in a more efficient, less privacy-destroying way if only some corporation's interests weren't more important than your own