How much of Google returning better results than AltaVista, though, came down to Google being able to expand its index with new pages faster? What I remember is exactly what the article claims: that competing search engines couldn't "keep up" with Google's increasing scale.
My experience, or at least my recollection, was quite different. I had no complaints whatsoever with AltaVista not adding pages to the index quickly enough; rather, it is that the results increasingly appeared to be random pages that happened to contain the search term, and you might need to wade through several pages of results to find what you were looking for. With Google, the page you wanted seemed to almost uncannily be located toward the top of the list. At the time, it seemed like magic.
I remember Google mostly for having good results, yes, but more for being FAST. It was just soo fast, when all other search engines took up to seconds to show results.
