Before people figured out how to game PageRank, Google was spooky. Unreal. Incredibly good results.

I remember google having equivalent or even inferior results to yahoo search for quite a while, especially in niche topics like sports and music. The differences in algorithms just didn’t matter much for average case queries.

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.