>One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive

>One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop ??? PageRank. It was PageRank, and the fact that they didn't rely on the lies put into <meta> tags. There was no feedback loop at that point.