[mancerayder]

Google won because it was simple. Just type in the text box. Yahoo was a page full of junk and alta vista had a difficult to navigate search results. If I remember, it's been a while!

Google remains simple, but its output is corrupt.

[marcosdumay]

Google won because it didn't fill your result pages with trashy unrelated answers on the hope to show you more ads.

There were plenty of engines where you could just type a query and they would list sites for you.