Google's success pleases me, for several reasons.

For one thing, as a search engine, it has always worked better than it's competitors, and I like it when quality triumphs in the world.

But I’m also pleased because Google is such an awesomely useful and tool in ways I happen to care about most. I spend most of my time writing. The novel I’m working on now is historical fiction, so naturally I have spent many hundreds of hours doing research. A lot of that has happened in books, but even more of my research, at this point, happens online.

Every day I hunt for bits of information on Google dozens of times, and they are generally pretty arcane bits. Such as the size of a famine ship that brought Irish immigrants to New York in March of 1847, or the name of the hero of Baudelaire's short story "Fanfarlo."

Could I write what I write without web searches? Of course: I managed to muddle through for 10 or 20 years without internet access. But now I don’t have to schlep to the library or write a letter to some archive or get on the phone to a professor I've never met. I can get most of the facts I need instantly, at my desk, the moment I decide I need them. And sometimes in the process I stumble serendipitously across facts I didn’t know I needed, which inspire new narrative zigs and zags.

In other words, Google has become essential to the way I do my work as a writer.

And I realized that what has made Google successful, in addition to its very powerful software, is a set of smart, simple design choices.

For starters, they’ve kept the graphics bare-bones and utilitarian, even austere. Unlike any other big-time internet company, the Google.com home page is mostly white -- just 30 words huddled at the top, no photographs, no jam-packed cascade of data, no jumpy special effects.

Then when you do a search, the resulting links are displayed simply, according to their relevance and overall popularity -- not, as some other search engines do, with advertisers' links pushed up top. Google does sell advertisements – that's why the service is free to you and me -- but instead of masquerading as “pure” information, or flashing and buzzing in your face, the ads are small and off to the side, visually quiet and unobtrusive.

Has any business of this size ever owed quite so much of its success to intelligent graphic design? I don’t think so.

What we have here is a virtuous circle. The design creativity of its makers has turned Google into an almost perfect tool -- a tool that in turn lets the creativity of its users thrive. How rare and completely delightful that is.