My recollection is that AltaVista had paid inclusions (paid links to be placed prominently in search results) in its search results. I think most search engines at that time did. So that the first AltaVista results page or two was rarely what I was looking for. So I did a a good deal of skipping past the product and service placement links to get to the information I was looking for.

Google appeared to be an exception in that it didn't appear to have paid inclusions, so I could usually start with something on the first page.

Strange. I don't recall that at all, and I think I used AltaVista a lot in 1997-99.

Despite all the hype surrounding pagerank, which continues to this day, Google's search results were not of noticeably higher quality (to me) than the alternatives. What was rings-around-the-competition better was how fast they were.

I used AltaVista back then and I clearly remember how much I hated it for being mostly useless. I was into data compression and wanted to find as much resources as possible, so I browsed through hundreds of pages of search results mostly containing gas pumps to pick up a couple of data compression articles. Google redeemed me.

I distinctly remember that my typical workflow involved searching on AltaVista plus another search engine. The advantage AltaVista always seemed to have was that it had a larger index than a lot of competitors. Often, the ranking was not especially good for obscure topics, so I remember I would often have to dig into 2 or 3 pages of results to find what I wanted. When Google came along, I would search AltaVista and Google. Google always seemed to require less digging that AltaVista.