That's why I used Altavista before that. Google kept things very simple while other sites loaded on the bloat and garbage.
I don't remember ever feeling like what I found with Google couldn't be found with Altavista or lycos. But a lot of the other companies tried to prematurely monetize to an excessive degree.
I think the difference in algorithms matters even less now, and that google’s modern advantage is not in ranking algorithms but in automated display of structured data, like sports league results, filmography for an actor, etc., and work around knowledge graph methods to automate that stuff.
Early google was unequivocally only differentiated by branding and sparse design.
It wasn't just the simplicity. Google was also a lot faster, and had no ads!
How ironic that advertisement later became their bread and butter.
I think the vast majority of users don't consciously evaluate search engines for accuracy. And most non-technical users just assume that if they cant find it through X, its probably not there.
Google invested in the fundamental from the start and they pushed the limit of what search engines can do.
When I was in my first role as an IT manager, I set the policy that all machines had their default page set to google.com away from Yahoo, because yahoo was an ugly mess.
Google was clean and simple. This was the only reason. I made the edict to set it to google and so some people said "you should go work for google since you like them so much" - man I wish I had tried to do so then.
And this was in 1998 or so...
The main reason? "And" searches. Brilliant.
Then Google showed up, and Google had PageRank. Boom, the top result for any simple query was what you wanted.
Sure Google had a vastly superior algorithm but I don't think too many people really grasped that at the time.