There were no real search engine back then. Those sites were just curated list of websites. Google was the first one to crawl the whole web and made it possible to find them.
Call me shallow, but I liked the simple, distraction free landing page and the "feeling lucky" button.
Altavista was certainly better than what came before, but you had to get your query just right in order to find what you wanted. And if you couldn't find the right words for the query, you were sunk. With Google, you could get ok-ish results with a sub-standard query, and the ok-ish results would often help you figure out a better query.