"Fast, clean and no ads" was a big deal for me. Internet was very slow when I starting using it. When I discovered Google, it was a breath of fresh air to my life. For a change I was using a search engine that loaded fast.

I've come around to the idea that the old 'directory style' search engines is a feature that I'd quite like to see again. If a search engine is only available as a search listing then you're entirely at the mercy of the algorithm. With a human-curated directory of links there's some checking going on, and it's much harder for someone to game their way to the top of the listings.

With a pure search system, you can endlessly tweak your results to precisely what you need in any obscure topic space using search terms.

With a human curated directory, you will instead find that whatever terms you add, you always get dumped back into the same box of hand built pages of results. Once you’ve mined those out, this will get really frustrating.

A blend of the two approaches would be useful. Expose the internal topic classifications and let searchers manipulate them to narrow or widen the search space.

Such a directory would still face similar problems Google has to deal with on daily basis.Popular!= Good or reliable and etc.

I remember I and many others starting to use them for exactly that. Look at this comparison (not that early is starts at 2004 while google iirc started to see usage at 2001)

http://aautar.digital-radiation.com/blog/uploaded_images/goo...

Some other search engines were even more heavy handed on advertising.

Right, but the received wisdom was that the ‘winner’ of the internet race to be the number 1 portal would look more like Yahoo, Excite or AOL. A big front page with lots of content and big juicy adds. If Google had been acquired, they would simply have become the tiny little search box on the Excite front page. That could have left space for another company to develop competing search tech and beat them with a minimalist approach. Or for another heavy duty portal page site to develop competing tech. Maybe it was only Google’s radically minimalist focus that allowed their superior search tech to really stand out.

Agreed. This is what Excite looked like: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a3/Excite_...

Don’t forget that Pagerank, the ‘results must have all terms’ feature and the very large index made for significantly better results that the competition had.