How so? My memory of Alta Vista was so-so search results with a top page littered with garbage.

Exactly like Google since 2011 +/- 2 years (the so-so search results part) and Google the last few years (the littered with garbage part)?

I have used Google since probably 2001-2002 sometime and a number of other search engines before. It is rather obvious to me and I have writing and screenshots from around the time quality took a dive that supports it.

I think over time the story has become that AV and Yahoo were overtaken by Google because the latter had a cleaner design, which if you think about it for more than a moment doesn't really constitute much of a moat.

Google was also technically better when it released and importantly there was no way to buy ones way to the top.

Back then I think people mostly agreed that the results that ranked on top in Google generally were there because of criteria that benefited the end user.

I mean, even as crazy as Google results has been the last few years they have still managed to be better than Bing and DDG who both manages to have worse ranking and also like Google completely ignore my doublequotes.

Reminder: Alta Vista looked like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista#/media/File:Altavist...

Exactly

Google