[arjenpdevries]

That's the marketing story. I think it's because they didn't clutter their homepage like AltaVista did.

[margarina72]

I was a heavy AltaVista user back in the time, I can tell you Google results were really higher quality, it wasn't only their homepage (even if that was also quite refreshing).

[rrwo]

Nope. It's actually how it worked. They patented it and published papers about it.