When Google came out it was way better than Altavista, people switched instantly. Specifically Altavista looked at how often a search term was in the result, which wasn't always a helpful thing. Google also noticed if search terms were near each other in a page which was really helpful, otherwise you would get forums with one search term in one message, and the other far away in an unrelated message. Google fixed that.

The web has changed these days, it's an adversarial system now, where web results are aggressively bad and constantly trying to trick you. Google is much harder to implement now.

It was fast, which almost nothing else was at the time.

And if people on dialup connections think you’re slow, it’s because you are.