In addition to maps Gmail, and Google Search were category defining implementations. They bought YouTube and have steadily increased it’s capabilities and have made it into a category defining implementation.
https://digitalstateconsulting.com/knowledge-is-power/brief-...
> Phil Mui, the former Group Project Manager of Google Analytics, explains how Google’s initial version sought to democratise advanced web analytics to the masses. “The primary focus was to make sure that not only people who are willing to pay a million dollars or more on analytics products are able to get access to a very decent set of tools to understand the behaviours of online browsers”, he said at a conference in New York 2011.
> Google realised the infinite potential of data to create a better experience for web users. “By liberating this tool we could empower companies of all sizes to become smarter and more effective online”, remarked Muret. “We assigned considerable resources to our online solution and released it to the public for free [and]…has since grown beyond anything that we could have expected”.
Sure, the homepage of Altavista was a relic of the 90s. The SERP however wasn’t as radically different. If a minimal homepage is enough to be “category defining” to you, we can just agree to disagree and move on.
There’s a reason we “Google it” and don’t “altavista it”. ISTR altavista’s pitch over yahoo was that they indexed the entire web, they just couldn’t return meaningful results. Google could.
We probably verbed google rather than other products, because of that consistency. But at least my kid's peer group seems to have taken to using 'search up' as their verb... Kind of like look up.