Online Extra: Google's Search for Simplicity: "SWISS-ARMY KNIFE. She views the site much like a Swiss Army Knife. It may have a plethora of features, but they shouldn't all be flayed open, overwhelming the user.

'If you try to grab [the knife] with everything open, you'll get hurt,' she says. 'We try to add functionality in context,' to what the user is doing.

The search for simplicity goes beyond the home page. Mayer frequently puts her designers through exercises, such as mocking up a no-scroll version of Google's results pages. To achieve this, the list of results had to be trimmed from 10 to 5 links. "