Other search engines at the time (I'm thinking Altavista, Lycos, AskJeeves, Yahoo) were plagued with ads and also their search results were not as good. You mig

Other search engines at the time (I'm thinking Altavista, Lycos, AskJeeves, Yahoo) were plagued with ads and also their search results were not as good. You might find what you're looking for on the eighth page of results, whereas with Google it was the first result practically all the time. It loaded, fast, it had no ads, it was magic. That's when the "I feel lucky" button meant something (before it was killed off years later in the name of serving up more ads)