Gmail was a way, way, way better experience than Hotmail or anything else when it started (and even almost a decade later). Maps blew everyone's mind at launch too and instantly made an entire group of direction and mapping websites irrelevant. Google Earth was magical just spending hours trotting around the globe too. Reader (RIP) was by far the best RSS reader.

Maps and Earth were not in-house built but purchased.

Maps was amazing at first and then it got ruined bit by bit. But somewhere along the way it got awesome again. I think it's really good right now.

WAIT WHAT?

[real time search ongoing]

Goodness how have I not known this?!

Yep, I had Earthviewer 3D installed on my PC before Google Earth was a thing.

The maps guys then pushed on to even greater heights with … Google Wave…

> Gmail was a way, way, way better experience than Hotmail or anything else when it started

I recall seeing it as sluggish and awkward when I finally decided to check it, abusing Ajax. Other web interfaces (that I tried) were more lightweight and predictable, and regular mail clients I found to be a much better UX. So I've mostly attributed Gmail popularity to Google promoting it, possibly using that invite-only policy to make the users to spread the invitations. It sounds like at least some users actually liked it, but I don't think it's a clear example of a good service by Google.

Don't forget the other advantage of Gmail over other webmail hosts back then: the amount of free disk space they gave to every account was HUGE. And if you wanted regular mail clients, IIRC Gmail always allowed you to use a traditional mail client, both over IMAP and over POP3.

Definitely in the 90s and early 2000s at least, possibly longer. That was part of their thing, being the champion of user experience.

Early Google set themselves apart with the user experience. For example, Google Search's homepage's simplicity was astonishing at the time; a direct inverse of the bloated pages most of their competitors at the time favored (Yahoo, Alta Vista, AOL, and Dogpile were pretty bad if I remember correctly, and Ask Jeeves was somewhere in the middle. The others I don't remember as well). GMail may have not been the best technically speaking (I don't know), but from a user standpoint it was cleaner than the alternatives, who would include things like links to news stories in their inboxes.

I recommended people use Google in part because there was, at the time, less risk of them clicking on something and being confused by it. (Why is there news in my email? Where's my email? How do I search?)

On the other hand, now search for “bicycles” on Google.

Oh, there's a reason that I said 'recommended' past tense. ;)