>Google's algorithms and page crawlers were not that revolutionary or different from anything the other search engines were doing;
Back in 1998, Google's algorithm ("pagerank") of weighting href backlinks using linear algebra was revolutionary compared to the other search engines like Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista, etc that were built on TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency)[1].
The more simplistic TF-IDF approach of older search engines suffered from "keyword stuffing" such as invisible words at the bottom of the HTML page for SEO. Google's new search engine was an immediate improvement because it surfaced more relevant pages that beat the useless pages with keyword stuffing. At the time, Google Search results were truly superior to the junk Yahoo and AltaVista was showing.
Back in 1998, Google's algorithm ("pagerank") of weighting href backlinks using linear algebra was revolutionary compared to the other search engines like Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista, etc that were built on TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency)[1].
The more simplistic TF-IDF approach of older search engines suffered from "keyword stuffing" such as invisible words at the bottom of the HTML page for SEO. Google's new search engine was an immediate improvement because it surfaced more relevant pages that beat the useless pages with keyword stuffing. At the time, Google Search results were truly superior to the junk Yahoo and AltaVista was showing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf