Yeah, the thing that set Google apart was that its web page had only: the logo, the search field, and the go button.

It was clean. It was lean.

Notably, at a the time, a lot of those of us who were "power users" tended to stick with Altavista longer in many cases because Google was at first not so much better that they could compete with highly precise use of Altavista's search operators.

Google was much more noticeably better for non-technical who didn't know how to improve their results and didn't care to learn, but at the time that didn't translate to a massive numerical advantage in terms of users.

do you have evidence to support this position? they certainly weren't the only search engine with a cute, zany name. trying to recall exactly why i switched. i don't entirely recall, but i remember that at the time i used a rotation of multiple engines, usually starting with metacrawler and then branching to other engines that didn't index. after switching to google, that rotation immediately ended. my recollection is that results really were that much better.

i certainly appreciated google's design minimalism, but it certainly wasn't make-or-break, seeing as i was willing to go through multiple sites on every search.

i wouldn't have cared about what you termed 'tricking the user', which feels like a skewed characterization. i just interpreted such things as 'no results', the same way i do now.

that said, i can't really support my position either. i'm curious if anyone has tried to measure the quality of search over time.. you always see a lot of opinions about it here and elsewhere but it seems very much non-obvious to me, and hugely multivariate.

Google's results were significantly better than other search engines, but only for a while. Soon SEO caught up with it using link farms and other forms of link spam. Then it was basically the same as old engines which were already spammed to death using other methods.

That period of better result quality, combined with other factors you mention, was long enough that most of Google's competition went away. So when the quality went down there was no-one to switch back to.

Agreed. The first search I made on Google (~1999?), probably for something tech-related, turned up several porn results on the first page. Back to AltaVista, DMOZ, and webrings for at least another year…

No, it was better because it was much faster and results were much better. I remember those days, we (me, friends and family) were all using Altavista or lycos before, do you think we all switched to Google in a blink just because of it's spartan design?