Yeah, not revisionism. Google had better search quality for tech users but Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Excite, Inktomi etc had a better results for gen

Yeah, not revisionism. Google had better search quality for tech users but Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Excite, Inktomi etc had a better results for general users. So tech users adopted Google and when asked by non-techie friends which search engine they used would reply Google. And then Gmail moat appeared and getting a Gmail account was the highest prestige and everyone was trying to get one.