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Not for everybody. I remember it being bloated and easily tricked. SEO in those days was just jamming keywords into the page repeatedly. I also don't remember exact pharase searches.

If AltaVista had been fine, Google wouldn't have grown so easily.

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Honestly, the only reason I switched was the interface.

A blank webpage was preferable to all that clutter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Altavista-1999.png

Very true. I don't remember the exact date I switched to Google [1.] but I permanently switched after a single search. It was simply that much better, even at the beginning.

1. I first found out about Google way down deep in a /. thread, probably between hot grits and GNAA troll posts.

I first learnt about google from this post in tasty bits from the technology front: http://tbtf.com/archive/1998-05-11.html#s08

Hard to believe they only had 25 million documents indexed then.

Now that you mention it, a side effect of the simple design was that Google was blazingly fast in comparison - not only for the initial page (which could be cached in contrast to altavista which displayed news), but also for the search results

Looks as cluttered as Yahoo does now.

True, AltaVista was my homepage until SEO became so common that 99% of seaches were worthless, if you didn't do a detailed 20 key-word query using clever use of "+"s "-"s and other codes. To try to fight spam yourself, manually.

I also don't remember exact pharase searches.

They existed. I switched to Google immediately after they stopped supporting them. I've spoken with a few people who made the same move for the same reason. Maybe you started using AltaVista after that point?

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