Back in the day I used other search engines but they became more and more cluttered with a lot of flashing lights and colours. I started to use Google almost exclusively thereafter because it was simple and clean.

i think some part of it is people themselves using word google as synonyme for search. And in general acting as if google was only search engine in existence.

Just a few weeks ago I saw a photo of an article circa 1995 where Sergey brin says "other search engines care about monetization, we care about quality" or something like that

Hehe, this classic.

Back in the day, I seem to recall using AltaVista before Google came along.

Anyway, most search engines back then were more like web portals, full of ads and annoying UI elements, they were treated more like a startpage than a simple search engine.

Then came Google, it was clean, it loaded fast, it got out of your way and let you focus on your work.

Then the actual search....

While other search engines had their tools to find the best result, none had done it with the care that Google did.

Every search engine had the same problem:

"How do we decide to rank the pages we scan to find if they are reputable or not?"

Someone at Google had a brilliant idea:

"Let's simply check how many times a page is linked to from other pages!"

That is a really clever idea, back in the day websites were built by enthusiasts, people wanted to share what they found, so they made link pages to interesting and good sites.

Google used that data and put it into their page rank system to help users find the best result.

Better result lead to more users and so on.

Then it was time to monetize....

I remember 30-ish years ago being in elementary school, when computers in the classroom were still kind of a new idea and we were first being trusted with access to the Internet. They brought one of the computer teachers into our classroom to teach us how to use them since not everyone had a home PC, let alone an Internet connection at the time.

One of the first things they taught us was about search engines. They mentioned the big five or six search engines at the time, which, if I recall, included yahoo, ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, lycos, hotbot, and I feel like there was one more. The school computer's homepage was set to "yahooligans" which was sort of a kid-friendly yahoo homepage. They may have gone over some of the pros and cons of those different sites, but I don't really remember what they were.

This was also right around the time that Google was brand-new and rapidly rising in the ranks. They mentioned Google, and I'm pretty sure what they said about it was that it was new, and it had the most search results.

And as a bunch of ~10 year olds, that was pretty much all we needed to hear, we might have given yahoo or ask Jeeves a try if we couldn't find what we were looking for on Google, but Google was always our first try.

It had an advantage of having a kind of funny, and easy-to-remember name, which yahoo also had. I feel like around that age we also learned about "a googol" being a very large number (1 followed by 100 zeros) so we had that word association of it being very big in our minds.

So for at least one classroom in my elementary school in Pennsylvania, that's pretty much how it got its hooks in us.

From a broader perspective, Google had a very clean and simple interface. It loaded fast, there wasn't a lot to distract you, it had that "I'm feeling lucky" button that gave it just enough light-hearted whimsy that it felt friendly and welcoming without feeling like too much of a novelty website. It was basically just a logo, a search bar, a couple buttons, and then some legalese and such at the bottom of the page. Even if you'd never used the Internet before then, if you managed to find your way to www.google.com you could probably figure out how to do a search from there. By comparison, if you went to, for example, Yahoo, you'd be greeted with a ton of other stuff on the homepage.

And, for a long time it was actually a really good search engine. It had a ton of results, and usually managed to put something relevant on the front page. It didn't have obnoxious flashing ads or anything, and occasionally the "sponsored results" (ads) were even relevant and might have been exactly what you were searching for anyway.

They also had some good buzz about them as a company (and you can certainly argue about how much of that was deserved.) They had the "don't be evil" thing going for them. You'd hear about the cool perks they had in their offices for their employees. Google seemed to be sort of the good guys of the internet for a while.

And they started branching out from search, and a lot of their other services were also pretty damn solid. There's a reason that everyone and their mother uses Gmail - it's free and it works as well or better than any other email provider you had at the time. I remember when I set up my Gmail account 20-ish years ago, my main email account was through Verizon since that was the internet provider my parents had. I feel like I had a lot of problems logging into that account and their website was always a little wonky and difficult to navigate. And at some point I think Verizon actually stopped offering email service and my parents had to migrate to something else anyway (and of course Gmail was the obvious choice)

And then they were big enough that they were an obvious choice to be the default search when that started to be something that was baked into web browsers. And then they even came out with their own browser that, at the time, seemed so much better than whatever else you were probably using at the time. Chrome is kind of a memory hog these days (or was the last time I used it) but I remember when it first came out it felt a lot snappier to me than Firefox or internet explorer did at the time. And again, it really simplified the interface, getting rid of some extraneous toolbars and such that no one really used anyway (and, at the time, websites getting you to install their toolbar or browser extension or whatever was sort of like how today they beg for you to get their app. If you looked at some random person's browser there was a good chance they had 2 or 3 random extra toolbars installed that were probably full of spyware or outright viruses)

And of course, they have android, the only real competitor to iOS. With all of their stuff baked into it by default, further cementing a lot of people into the Google ecosystem.

In the early days, the days of “don’t be evil”, Google’s PageRank algorithm was miles ahead of their competitors’ methods. Combined with a clean interface and unobtrusive text-only ads, clearly separated from search results, the site was a real pleasure to use.

I remember growing up with the earlier Search engine and then Google game along.

Google had massive selling points at the time: a clean interface that was quick to load (remember it was dial up era for most people!), unobtrusive text ads (most engines were filled with images pop ups and pop unders like the worst ad filled sites of today without ad blockers) and the key was tge search results were good. Pretty much ever search, you'd find something useful on the first page if not the first result. It was SO much easier than the other engines where you had trawl hard and keep changing your search terms.

Google made search easy and unobtrusive. I used to use AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo and AskJeeves before google. Once google arrived I literally just used google - I didnt need to use 3 or 4 engines to get what I wanted.

The other search portals tried the trick of bundling email and chat clients and news etc. Google was just search, and then eventually an unobtrusive news tab. And when gmail launched email, they promised 1GB storage for free and forever increasing in size, with a clean interface.

Google won because they offered people what they wanted, without the in your face ads. And they really got in the background that the user is the product and monetized all our data - without us realising.

And they used their success to establish dominance, buying ad providers, veonf aggressive in selling ads, and crucially being successful in click throughs. People ignore colourful picture ads, theyre just annoying, but they click through sponsored search results.

Others have tried to copy the formula - look at Bing - but its hard to displace an encumbant. And the old guard like Yahoo and Lycos etc didnt adapt fast enough, or made huge mistakes in using google search themselves and just trying to be portals. People cut out those middle men fast.

they were the first to have a completely blank front page optimised to load as fast as possible. everyone elne packed their pages full of ads, news, and weather.

It used to work

They won the search engine war by being better at search compared to all the others.

The index of content available online, which they built and updated themselves. A policy of constantly tweaking the algorithm to make it understand what us monkeys want. No ads on the first search page. And then absolutely dominating the online ads market, which kept financing the continuous improvement to the service. Until they realised this was to their own detriment and made it ask Jeeves level competent again. They won the initial war but lost the peace.

Prioritising search with the right result almost always on the first page. Stripped back interface. Back in the day search engines could be and often were a crapshoot, then along comes Google and surfaces what you are after first time the vast majority of times you used it. Plus the Google search page was a logo a text box and 2 buttons, you had to go looking for a weather report, a stock ticker, a news feed, an entertainment feed, etcetera etcetera. It was the disruptive tech upstart, now it's the incumbent, basically all the evangelist algorithm nerds took their stock options and bailed. Now we have advertising obsessed business majors and cryptobros piloting the zombie husk of Google around.

Speed and pagerank. They served up results that other people with similar queries favored, and did it faster than anyone else.