It also helped that Google, by-and-large, were doing extremely good things. For all the complaints about the (very real) problems the internet has today, I thin

It also helped that Google, by-and-large, were doing extremely good things. For all the complaints about the (very real) problems the internet has today, I think people have lost sight of how much the internet sucked in 1997. There's a website you loved, but you forgot the URL? Good luck ever finding that again. Want to watch a video? Hope you've got an updated QuickTime plug-in and a lot of time to wait for the shitty webhost to serve a 240p video at 80B/s. Your daughter just emailed you a few photos of your grandchildren? Better delete the last 5 years of your conversation history to make space for it - Hotmail and Yahoo! only offered 10MB of storage before Gmail launched with 100x that. Want to monetise your blog? Hope you're happy with your readers getting malware, because every ad service out there is insanely shady.