The clean unloaded page where the basics are there and this is it.
Google does a great job to keep things that way.
It works
Nothing else/more is needed.
The usual full colour, full pages of traditional website templates are not used in the major sites.
These might work when your site is simply your business card and you don't expect people to actually surf your site much.
But when someone spends lots of time on the site then, a design that was aattractive at first can be very invasive and steal attention from what really matters: the content
So... keep things simple and clean. That's what really works