Even more fortuitous was having no ads or anything else that the small number of early Googlers would have considered evil in any way.

Huh? Did we ask forget about the era of pop-up ads on the Internet?

That's what I mean, when Google became generally available they had none of that on their site.

For quite a while at least before they joined the crowd.

Google had ads (AdWords) since 2000, only 2 years after it started existing.

It was very different from the punch-the-monkey style ads that had taken over the Internet, though. Google ads were exclusively text based and unobtrusive. They relied on showing you the right ad for what you happened to be searching for at the moment, rather than grabbing your attention and forcing you to think about stuff you didn't really care about.

Those were the best years.