What was different about Google eventually made it popular, but it also got a lot of people to avoid them over the lack of control of the query. It was not nearly as clear cut initially.
Google was initially much better on simple queries, but not competitive with "expert" users who knew how to use Altavista's query operators properly, or who were familiar with metasearch engines when looking for very specific material.
Google succeeded because they were similar enough that it was easy to try them, but met resistance because they were different enough that for a portion of the user base it was not clear that the advantages they had on simple queries was worth it.
The superiority of their approach first became "universally" clear as the number of pages exploded and tweaking your queries became an exercise in frustration, coupled with the explosion of users not familiar with how to compose a more specific query.
I know a lot of people - myself included - who took a long time to switch to Google from the first time we tried it because other search engines worked better for us at the time.
This too is a common pattern: Early adopters get so caught up in specifics of early products that when an evolution of the concept arrives that has profound impact on usability, it gets met with a shrug or dismissed because it doesn't fit into the usage patterns those early adopters have learnt in order to overcome the limitations of earlier products.
Often something will look like a step back for the expert users making up the bulk of users of its predecessors (because you either become an expert user, or give up), and first gains traction by expanding the market to users for whom the features who look like flaws to the former group is what makes the product usable to them at all.
E.g. I remember early PDA adopters being dismissive of the iPhone on-screen keyboard, because it was "pointless": Grafitti worked so much better on a small screen.... for those of us who had spent a couple of years or more learning how to write fast with it. For everyone else, the iPhone keyboard made it usable in ways Palm devices weren't.
Google was initially much better on simple queries, but not competitive with "expert" users who knew how to use Altavista's query operators properly, or who were familiar with metasearch engines when looking for very specific material.
Google succeeded because they were similar enough that it was easy to try them, but met resistance because they were different enough that for a portion of the user base it was not clear that the advantages they had on simple queries was worth it.
The superiority of their approach first became "universally" clear as the number of pages exploded and tweaking your queries became an exercise in frustration, coupled with the explosion of users not familiar with how to compose a more specific query.
I know a lot of people - myself included - who took a long time to switch to Google from the first time we tried it because other search engines worked better for us at the time.
This too is a common pattern: Early adopters get so caught up in specifics of early products that when an evolution of the concept arrives that has profound impact on usability, it gets met with a shrug or dismissed because it doesn't fit into the usage patterns those early adopters have learnt in order to overcome the limitations of earlier products.
Often something will look like a step back for the expert users making up the bulk of users of its predecessors (because you either become an expert user, or give up), and first gains traction by expanding the market to users for whom the features who look like flaws to the former group is what makes the product usable to them at all.
E.g. I remember early PDA adopters being dismissive of the iPhone on-screen keyboard, because it was "pointless": Grafitti worked so much better on a small screen.... for those of us who had spent a couple of years or more learning how to write fast with it. For everyone else, the iPhone keyboard made it usable in ways Palm devices weren't.