Altavista was the OG. I remember it being cantankerous and requiring you to specific in how you searched, but if you knew how to use it, it was unmatched. Until Google.
When Google came out it was way better than Altavista, people switched instantly. Specifically Altavista looked at how often a search term was in the result, which wasn't always a helpful thing. Google also noticed if search terms were near each other in a page which was really helpful, otherwise you would get forums with one search term in one message, and the other far away in an unrelated message. Google fixed that.
The web has changed these days, it's an adversarial system now, where web results are aggressively bad and constantly trying to trick you. Google is much harder to implement now.
When Google came out, I started using it for some things, because yes it was better at some things, but I didn't stop using Altavista. Stayed with it until the very end, for cases where I could be certain that I knew the exact words that'd be in the page, and Google just sucked at that.
These days I can't even -exclude terms that I know would only appear in the wrong results, Google will show me those results anyway. Nothing about adversarial SEO requires them to ignore my input, that's a different choice.
