No, that was a gimmick, it actually turned most people off the first time they saw it, along with the name and the clown color letters. It was the quality of the search results using pagerank being way ahead of the best curated alternatives. Then the quirky UX suddenly became a great brand for a product that Just Worked. For their first 5-10 years they hardly put a foot wrong, everything they did was something nobody had ever seen before.

IIRC a copyright notice was added to the bottom of the site, because in early user testing, people thought the page was still loading because it was so barren