Why did I care when I discovered Infoseek, Excite, Open Directory Project, Dogpile (I'm fuzzy on the exact order) and eventually Google? Do you remember your feeling when playing with a new search engine? Differences in access to information are real and quickly felt.

(disclaimer: ex-googler. In words Google itself likes to use, because long-tail search matters. Also I should mention I now default to DuckDuckGo, on privacy grounds, but it's not a step up just "surprisingly not bad", I frequently repeat a search in Google and get more results)