[atombender]

As the other commenters point out, Google was absolutely a game changer. Their user adoption growth was stunning for good reason. Just a few months after launch, "everyone" was using Google.

That's not the whole explanation for their success, though. They could have cratered after that for all sorts of reasons. A large part of how they succeeded was the discovery of the ad model. A lot of people forget that ads were all manually negotiated before Google offered self-serve ad creation (Overture did the bidding system first, but Google was better).

They also starting building on "big data" very early on; AdWords reused the same tech that drove relevance ranking (PageRank and click-through feedback loop), so by the time competitors were scrambling to compete, Google had amassed tons of organic data that were only available thanks to their scale, and not something competitors could bootstrap.

But none of that would have mattered if the product wasn't good. I started using Google around 1998. The childish design was off-putting at first, and made me feel uncertain about whether it was a serious brand that would last — this was the age where new search engines appeared all the time (I used HotBot a lot myself) — but the search quality and speed was undeniable.