Altavista and others beside were already crawling the web.
Yahoo and Dmoz were curated but Google definitely wasn't the first crawler.
As for the approaches being victim to keyword stuffing: that was because the algorithms used were exclusively 'on page' without assigning a value to links.
Yahoo's content was mostly US based if i remember correctly. The reason i switched to Google from Altavista was because of the reduced ads and clean look on the page. The results where about the same back then.
The use of 'near' queries on Altavista removed the spam and had they done some basic query rewriting it would have cleaned much of the spam up. Spam never affected me on Altavista.
Yahoo and Dmoz were curated but Google definitely wasn't the first crawler.
As for the approaches being victim to keyword stuffing: that was because the algorithms used were exclusively 'on page' without assigning a value to links.