Are you reading the same thing I'm writing? Is that why you think Google is used by the masses, rather than marketing and control of first placement (on Chrome, Android, and iPhones)?
Most people just use what's there and that happened to be Google's search engine. It's especially the case after massive growth of internet users due to mobile (ie, there were only ~300 million internet users in 1998 versus the billions online today).
Have you seen Google's growth chart? It was meteoric. All these things you mention came in or after 2007. Google was already a behemoth by the early 2000s and that was because it was just way better than anything else.
Most people just use what's there and that happened to be Google's search engine. It's especially the case after massive growth of internet users due to mobile (ie, there were only ~300 million internet users in 1998 versus the billions online today).