I remember 30-ish years ago being in elementary school, when computers in the classroom were still kind of a new idea and we were first being trusted with access to the Internet. They brought one of the computer teachers into our classroom to teach us how to use them since not everyone had a home PC, let alone an Internet connection at the time.

One of the first things they taught us was about search engines. They mentioned the big five or six search engines at the time, which, if I recall, included yahoo, ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, lycos, hotbot, and I feel like there was one more. The school computer’s homepage was set to “yahooligans” which was sort of a kid-friendly yahoo homepage. They may have gone over some of the pros and cons of those different sites, but I don’t really remember what they were.

This was also right around the time that Google was brand-new and rapidly rising in the ranks. They mentioned Google, and I’m pretty sure what they said about it was that it was new, and it had the most search results.

And as a bunch of ~10 year olds, that was pretty much all we needed to hear, we might have given yahoo or ask Jeeves a try if we couldn’t find what we were looking for on Google, but Google was always our first try.

It had an advantage of having a kind of funny, and easy-to-remember name, which yahoo also had. I feel like around that age we also learned about “a googol” being a very large number (1 followed by 100 zeros) so we had that word association of it being very big in our minds.

So for at least one classroom in my elementary school in Pennsylvania, that’s pretty much how it got its hooks in us.

From a broader perspective, Google had a very clean and simple interface. It loaded fast, there wasn’t a lot to distract you, it had that “I’m feeling lucky” button that gave it just enough light-hearted whimsy that it felt friendly and welcoming without feeling like too much of a novelty website. It was basically just a logo, a search bar, a couple buttons, and then some legalese and such at the bottom of the page. Even if you’d never used the Internet before then, if you managed to find your way to www.google.com you could probably figure out how to do a search from there. By comparison, if you went to, for example, Yahoo, you’d be greeted with a ton of other stuff on the homepage.

And, for a long time it was actually a really good search engine. It had a ton of results, and usually managed to put something relevant on the front page. It didn’t have obnoxious flashing ads or anything, and occasionally the “sponsored results” (ads) were even relevant and might have been exactly what you were searching for anyway.

They also had some good buzz about them as a company (and you can certainly argue about how much of that was deserved.) They had the “don’t be evil” thing going for them. You’d hear about the cool perks they had in their offices for their employees. Google seemed to be sort of the good guys of the internet for a while.

And they started branching out from search, and a lot of their other services were also pretty damn solid. There’s a reason that everyone and their mother uses Gmail - it’s free and it works as well or better than any other email provider you had at the time. I remember when I set up my Gmail account 20-ish years ago, my main email account was through Verizon since that was the internet provider my parents had. I feel like I had a lot of problems logging into that account and their website was always a little wonky and difficult to navigate. And at some point I think Verizon actually stopped offering email service and my parents had to migrate to something else anyway (and of course Gmail was the obvious choice)

And then they were big enough that they were an obvious choice to be the default search when that started to be something that was baked into web browsers. And then they even came out with their own browser that, at the time, seemed so much better than whatever else you were probably using at the time. Chrome is kind of a memory hog these days (or was the last time I used it) but I remember when it first came out it felt a lot snappier to me than Firefox or internet explorer did at the time. And again, it really simplified the interface, getting rid of some extraneous toolbars and such that no one really used anyway (and, at the time, websites getting you to install their toolbar or browser extension or whatever was sort of like how today they beg for you to get their app. If you looked at some random person’s browser there was a good chance they had 2 or 3 random extra toolbars installed that were probably full of spyware or outright viruses)

And of course, they have android, the only real competitor to iOS. With all of their stuff baked into it by default, further cementing a lot of people into the Google ecosystem.