Ah come on, the truth is not at all that altavista didn't spy, or didn't do ads. It's that they (and exite, yahoo, infoseek, ...) completely overdid the spying

Ah come on, the truth is not at all that altavista didn't spy, or didn't do ads. It's that they (and exite, yahoo, infoseek, ...) completely overdid the spying and ads and Google instead massively optimized their backend. And then a crisis came boom no more competitors. Google was the least obtrusive of all of the search competitors, and the most useful. That was their great strength. Man thinking about when this happened, it's now some 20 years ago. I'm old.