I read with amazement at how Google is allowed and could be bestowed a patent for their iconic search home page.

No, dont get me wrong, this is not about Google and I always give credit where it is due BUT gosh - I am very sure that way before Google, there were a few that came up with this UI design. I believe I saw Yahoo! Search page way before Google. While it may not be the same, I am quite sure the design principles are the same.

In my years of IT project developments and deployments, I am sure I have seen many of my teams' designer engineers come up with the same principles into database full-text search, Index servers, etc

In any case, this is interesting and this does change the patent strategy for many companies, doesn't it ? I wonder if Bing would do the same for its background images. Furthermore, to enable users to allow that to be turned on or off is itself a "patent-able* design, wouldn' it be ?