I worked at one of these companies during this era and yours is an often forgotten fact. It was a very long time before Google search result quality was any good. Their initial popularity was due almost entirely to page load speed, which they included on every page to highlight it.

The second was being able to serve a large index with parallelized querying, which was relatively easy for a newcomer company with no user base to engineer, and much harder for existing search engines trying to protect a revenue stream. People often don't really remember how late Google was to this business and how much of a difference that page speed indicator was.

The same exact argument could be made for Chrome. Google was extremely late to the browser game and most of the initial switch was on how quick it was in comparison to other browsers at the time.

Can you expand? Chrome seems to be popular but I don’t know the motivation for it.

I was replying to the parent comment above mine stating that Google came late to the browser game just as they did with the search game and if part of what initially made Google appealing was that they were simple and faster than other search engines, that is true when Chrome was introduced as well. Google explicitly marketed Chrome speed as a selling point. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0

HotBot and Copernic.us I think is what people used. Lycos too. But what started search engines down this wayward path was Overture that combined with doubleclick proved to be too attractive a revenue model and we’ve gone down hill since.