I think in general it's the wrong conclusion to draw that Google won because they had a simpler layout. That would have been an incredibly flimsy moat. They won because the had much better search results.

Their competitors gambled that the portal-aspect provided additional value that compensated for their shitty search results. It did not. That's also largely why they didn't adopt's Google's minimalist style. If they had adopted a similar design to Google it would have really been an apples to apples comparison, which would not have been flattering.