Old enough to remember pre-google, young whippersnapper! When the idea went round in 2000 that pagerank wasn't the key to google's success, I checked: there was a difference, but not enough to really matter, in the searches I tried.
Why would people use google? It was cool and new, had a great story... and made all tradeoffs in favour of letting you get on with searching, without a whole lot of portal BS/spam, fitting OP's criterion.
Google's biggest advantage today is speed - esp google suggest is unbelievably fast. It required a huge investment and knowhow that its less profitable competitors just can't match.
But the "some" was one of my PhD supervisors, who didn't mind a bit of thought-provoking... unlike today's HN, sad to see.
It certainly did in most cases, but it was hard to separate out the algorithm from the interface.
Even if the algorithm wasn't all that good to start with, it was damn fast, and clean, and no ads, so... you didn't mind refining a search a few times, because there were no annoying ads to slow things down.
Fast, uncluttered, no pay-for-rank
It's easy to forget there were lots of search engines before google. It was a boring "done" field