Weirdly similar experience. I too discovered Google in my college CS lab, when I noticed the (then) weird looking homepage. I had been swearing by AltaVista at the time. But it was with Google that I was able to, for the first time, get what I wanted without having to go through multiple pages of search results. A search engine giving you what you want within the first few results of your very first search attempt was just not a thing. Crafting search queries was an art, and so was wading through results.