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I don't think Google were the first to do search well - in my opinion that was DEC's AltaVista. But Altavista and the other keyword matchers suffered from the later pollution of their results by spammers and then compounded the problem by polluting their own search results with barely distinguishable adverts. We stopped trusting them.

Google was giving better search results during their rise to prominence because PageRank wasn't as vulnerable to spamming. They also chose to make their adverts unobtrusive and very clearly distinguished from the search results.

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Altavista's search was fast. It was a showcase for DEC's 64 bit Alpha and Ultrix technologies, and the ability for the systems to place the entire search index in memory (as I recall).

The search syntax was also pretty advanced. You had parenthetical grouping, logical operators, and if I recall, the +/- include/exclude syntax originated with (or was at least used by) AV.

What AV wasn't was particularly relevant. You needed that advanced search syntax to be able to narrow down what you were looking for, and you still usually had to go through a few pages of results to find the right stuff.

When Google first hit public beta, it was immediately and compellingly superior to anyone else's search. I remember giving it a few tries, and switching within a matter of a week or so. It just gave me what I wanted.

It took a long time for anyone else to get off the "but we need to keep users on our pages for ad clicks" mindset, and by then it was too late.

I don't really disagree with anything you're saying there - but if AV hadn't fouled their results I doubt I'd ever have bothered to try Google.