Altvista's edge over the competition at the time was that it indexed the most content. But google came in with pagerank and had superior results. There was a

Altvista's edge over the competition at the time was that it indexed the most content. But google came in with pagerank and had superior results. There was a 3 year span or so where people just attributed google's success to minimalism. in terms of minimalism, hotbot was a disaster, but it was the algorithm that truly set google apart. minimalism has its good points, but falsely attributing it to google's success probably focused too much attention to it in the internet of the 2010s.