According to a lecture by Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google), Google’s founders didn’t know HTML. One other interesting thing that was mentioned was:

“Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied ‘We are waiting for the rest of it’. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.”

I could see that happening. Go to Google right now and look at it. You’ll see what I mean. Anyways you should read the full article. Its an interesting read.