Unless you're some tribesman in the Amazon, or perhaps deep in the Sahara I doubt there are many people on the planet who don't know who Superman is so I don't think any googling would be necessary. 

I don't think it was just for cleverness' sake, it fit the story. Morrison's story in All-Star Superman was largely about Superman as a larger than life, mythic character and opening the book with that condensed, rhythmic retelling of the origin really fed into that idea. That clipped, almost chant like beginning, similar to the repetitions in the Odyssey, made it feel like part of some oral tradition. It had a really powerful effect in my mind, and that mythic feeling is a big part of the allure of most superheroes for me so I don't mind that it was short because it was effective.

It was recounted and embellished multiple times pre and post Crisis.  

There are occasions when an origin retelling is demanded by circumstances - anniversary issues, for one; arguably a change in the status quo is another.  They reaffirm the greatness of the character being celebrated and remind us that regardless of the changes that character might be undergoing in the present, there is a core to the character which is not being perverted.  At least, that's what they used to do.

At some point, DC decided that a character's origin was much more negotiable than its creators had intended.  When All Star Superman was released, Superman's origin in the main titles was virtually unknown beyond what Morrison presented here - John Byrne had radically changed ideas fundamental to the core of Superman's being with Man of Steel (his Superman was born not on Krypton but on Earth; he came to our planet by way of a birthing matrix rather than rocket ship; his Krypton was a cold, sterile place which "deserved to blow up"; Clark was passed off as the Kent's biological son and never set foot in an orphanage) and DC adhered to these details fairly closely for about 15 years.  In 2003 however, Mark Waid offered a new origin through Superman: Birthright which returned some elements of Siegel and Shuster's definitive telling (Superman was born on Krypton; Kryptonians weren't Vulcans), introduced new embellishments which had been utilized outside of continuity elsewhere (Superman isn't wearing an 'S' emblem on his chest but the crest of the House of El which just happens to look like an 'S'.  ugh) while retaining some of what Byrne had done.  The main titles played it coy however as to whether or not these changes would be accepted within the main continuity.  I think Waid's version was accepted for about all of five minutes, before Infinite Crisis screwed around again with Superman's beginnings in 2005-2006.  I don't know to what extent his origin was changed when the series ended, but it lead to yet another Superman origin in 2009 through Geoff Johns Superman: Secret Origin.


So...

This is the flotsam All Star Superman was dropped into when Grant Morrison's work was published in 2005.  Morrison intended this series to "distill everything we like about the characters into one simple package"  (https://web.archive.org/web/20090125025548/http://www.comicsbulletin.com/features/112602239631900.htm).

The problem of course, was that DC hadn't really been retelling Superman's origin since Man of Steel, but redoing it to the point where there was no officially agreed upon origin for the guy beyond the most basic details.  Was Superman born on Earth or Krypton?  Did he have superpowers right from the get go?  What was Krypton like?  Believe it or not, DC didn't actually have an official answer for these questions at the time.  Although Morrison made it clear that All Star Superman's Superman was going to be the Classic Superman picking up from 20 years prior, he also wanted it to appeal to "a more mainstream pop audience" and presumably didn't want to alienate fans of the mainstream version of the character circa 2005.  His "Doomed planet. Desperate Scientists. Last Hope. Kindly Couple." is pretty much the only common ground shared by Siegel and Shuster's origin, John Byrne's origin, Mark Waid's, and probably Infinite Crisis'.  Anything beyond that would have meant picking a side and I suspect that Morrison was careful to avoid this.  I've noticed that unless he's discussing Alan Moore, Morrison enthusiastically praises everybody and everything in the comic industry as if trying to be comic's number one diplomat.  If he wanted to do an origin which didn't contradict anything which had come before (I notice that even the artwork carefully has a 'maybe it is/maybe it isn't' quality to it's depiction of Jor-El's chest symbol being akin to Superman's) then this was pretty much all you could expect.