Was on a team that was trying to sell AltaVista a social media presence (before facebook/myspace/etc). Our people were mostly using Google, but we still wanted the client. One of the "moderation experts" on our side (i.e. - not tech or busniess) who evidently didn't understand what AltaVista was about asked them "Why don't you just use Google? It's better".
There were many search engines around during that time. Yahoo, Excite, Microsoft Live Search, Lycos... I don't recall any of them improving enough to rival early 2000's Google.
AdSense wasn't a thing until 2003. Google didn't have much revenue before that. However, they still surpassed their competition in quality of search results long before...
Yes. My point is that Google had a temporary search quality advantage… then AdSense-fueled revenue allowed them to convert that to a durable moat by outspending their competitors.
That didn't happen because they were magically amazing at search forever.
It happened because Google had a good business plan and could afford to throw gobs of money at engineers and infrastructure, in quantities that even Microsoft was unwilling to match.