In what way were the demos impressive? Not sure I follow: speed of crawling wouldn't affect speed of response; and having few users would enable it to be fast;

In what way were the demos impressive? Not sure I follow: speed of crawling wouldn't affect speed of response; and having few users would enable it to be fast; not having enough hardware to index the entire web would only limit the results. Mind you, just making a search engine is impressive, esp back then.