It was better than AltaVista, Yahoo!, Lycos, Tripod, Ask Jeeves, MetaCrawler et al. at the time when it gained its popularity.
Its main advantage was that they focussed on speed. You didn’t have to load a “homepage” with news articles and link directories (as all the other search engines had become) before you could type your search query. It was just a logo and a text input box.
The search index even at the beginning was pretty comprehensive too.
Google jumped the shark a long time ago though, around when they started putting ads on equal footing with the search results, and boosting their Shopping links.
It was better than AltaVista, Yahoo!, Lycos, Tripod, Ask Jeeves, MetaCrawler et al. at the time when it gained its popularity.
Its main advantage was that they focussed on speed. You didn’t have to load a “homepage” with news articles and link directories (as all the other search engines had become) before you could type your search query. It was just a logo and a text input box.
The search index even at the beginning was pretty comprehensive too.
Google jumped the shark a long time ago though, around when they started putting ads on equal footing with the search results, and boosting their Shopping links.