Right, but the received wisdom was that the ‘winner’ of the internet race to be the number 1 portal would look more like Yahoo, Excite or AOL. A big front page with lots of content and big juicy adds. If Google had been acquired, they would simply have become the tiny little search box on the Excite front page. That could have left space for another company to develop competing search tech and beat them with a minimalist approach. Or for another heavy duty portal page site to develop competing tech. Maybe it was only Google’s radically minimalist focus that allowed their superior search tech to really stand out.