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In the zero interest rate environment it was easier to get good advice and orders of magnitude more more money. A lot of those companies are crap.

Google had good timing but importantly, a good product and market fit. Prior search engines sucked in comparison with obnoxious monetization.

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I think the UX was the main reason people flocked to Google - an empty white page with a single search text entry and a button.

No, that was a gimmick, it actually turned most people off the first time they saw it, along with the name and the clown color letters. It was the quality of the search results using pagerank being way ahead of the best curated alternatives. Then the quirky UX suddenly became a great brand for a product that Just Worked. For their first 5-10 years they hardly put a foot wrong, everything they did was something nobody had ever seen before.

IIRC a copyright notice was added to the bottom of the site, because in early user testing, people thought the page was still loading because it was so barren

Google succeeded because they built a useful service and later were able to monetize it. Their timing could not have been better, searching the Internet at that time was horrendous.

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