To me is that offered quality services and, ultimately applications, for free. That turned into a lot of traffic, all pointing to their adsense and adwords program. Everything is integrated perfectly: Google maps/google earth --> adsense | picasa + google maps --> adsense | gmail, calendar, google talk, office applications, all ready to help you with your websites and websurfing experience | search engine --> adwords/adsense All for free, all good quality, perfect integration.
Someone told me Google results were better - whether they were or weren't didn't come in to it, because it was a lot simpler looking than the other engines at the time giving the impression Google were focussed solely on search and weren't a large corporation, therefore I thought it must be better and they're the good guys trying to do the world a favor. I felt smart for using Google. I also felt smart telling others to use Google. Repeat. Pete
the simpicity of the site. They were trying to be a search engine unlike Yahoo who want to be a portal. Also the relevancy. Google gives me the site i want everytime in the top 1,2,3. On MSN or Yahoo it may not even be on the first page.
as you noticed google search page is an extremely simple page with no useless stuffs, its as easy to use by a child as easy it is to use by adults
I agree that Google results are better. I find that they are a lot more relevant to what I'm looking for, and they give me the best search results.
A number of factors went into Google's success. It's simplicity was helpful but I think the way they churn or continue to adjust their algorithims plays a big part. I liked AltaVista for it's speed 10 years ago and because you could submit your site and one second later it was in the search results (then came spammers). I loved DogPile as you could get search results from ten or more search engines so you could see a group of results from Yahoo or Excite that might not have what you were looking for but the results from Lycos did. Google has kept things going by getting webmasters involved with Adsense, Base, and a variety of other tools.