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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.