and:

"(other search engines such as Altavista who had results which were poorer, but not hugely so)"

I upvoted you but for many Google is, and since quite a long time, just so much more than just the search engine.

Actually I don't even search that often anymore. My girlfriend hardly ever searches for stuff on the Internet: online life for her is GMail, YouTube (I take it you could hard there's search inside YouTube), eBay, Amazon, FB and a few other sites but that's basically it. What Google offers goes way beyond search: to me the biggest benefits are, by far, a spamless webmail, online backups and online editable/shareable Google Docs. Search is a very very very distant fourth or fifth service compared to the rest that Google is offering.