[thingie]

It could helped Google to get rid of some kind of unfamiliarity and a notion of being "that strange foreign thing". Seznam.cz is completely ubiquitous, when you had connected your modem and fired up the web browser for the first time, it would be the first place to go. If seznam.cz homepage didn't work for a while, you'd assume that "my internet is broken". Even a computer professional would just ping seznam.cz if he wanted to know whether the connection is ok.

Things (for a mass public) gets very different when you see a TV ad. (Before 2006 or so, google didn't even try to claim google.cz domain name, which was by that time occupied by some squatters or something.)