"the only reason Google started with such a simple design is because they didn’t have a webmaster or anyone that knew HTML."

Can anyone verify this? Sounds a bit far-fetched, to be honest - a company of engineers couldn't figure out HTML enough to put together a decent website? Isn't it more likely that they just put a MVP up and then iterated from there, and since Google was a highly functional search engine, they never felt the need to expand the homepage to include superfluous items?