I don't remember Lycos/Altavista etc rendering anywhere near as much of the web (as a proportion of what existed back then) locatable, having a radical stance on copyright or having less obtrusive ads...
>>notaha+(OP)
I vividly remember being unable to find anything useful in the first half-dozen pages on Lycos and Altavista and Yahoo and all the others, which is why Google took the entire market when they showed up with PageRank.