I remember Google being marginally better than Altavista but not much more.

The cool kids in those days used Metacrawler, which meta searched all the search engines.

Google was marginally better in popular searches and significantly better for tail searches. This is a big reason why it flourished with the technical and student crowd in earlier days because those exceedingly rare sub-sub-topics would get surfaced higher in the rankings. For the esoteric topics Yahoo didn't have it in catalog and Altavista maybe had it but it was on page 86. Even before spelling correction and dozens of other useful search features were added, it was tail search and finding what you were looking for sooner. Serving speed, too, but perhaps that was more subtle for some.

Metasearch only helps recall. It won't help precision, the metasearch still needs to rank the aggregate results.

I used Metacrawler, it was dog slow. The beauty of Google was it was super fast, and still returned results that were at least as good, and often better, than Metacrawler. After using Google 2-3 times I don’t think I ever used Metacrawler again.

You just gave me a weird flashback to 1997.

And hey maybe when combined with GPT-4o AskJeeves will finally work as intended.

With Altavista I had to go through 2 or 3 pages just to find the GNU website. I remember the Google beta as life-changing.

Remember dogpile? Great aggregator