Oh I can totally do this one. So yahoo and excite were search engines but a they brought in having an account and a customized home page. Others did as well but I would say excite was bests followed by yahoo but yahoo introduced tabs to its interface which, I think, is the reason they won out at the time. Here is the thing. The engines where kinda simple. They crawled the web and searched through them. Now in 2000 I was at a conference and someone is like. oh man you have to use google its results are better. And it was very true. Later I learned it was because of an algorithm that the founders had that did this page ranking based on the number of links to it. It made a lot of sense as this is actually what you see in academia with papers. So they just applied it to the web in a much more automated way. Then adding synopsises of pages to the search results was a big thing but they were already dominating by then. oh and gmail got a lot of people to make accounts. they offered a gig of storage when 5meg was common and 100meg was massive. that really is what hit yahoo sa their thing was kinda the logged in experience. Adding free general office sotware and general sotware was a cherry on top to keep people on.
Ok. so now you got to understand that algorithms were generally viewed as positive back then. Google certainly went into customized ads but they were pretty decent at anonymizing it. So ads could be directed in general terms to the audience. Facebook is what brought it into the hyper engagement and very specific tracking of every aspect of you.