Oh yes. I remember back in early 1998 I was using Copernic to aggregate and filter results from a whole bunch of search engines, because individually their results where so poor and irrelevant. Then I discovered http://google.stanford.edu and never looked back.
Its not that Google's page is completely cluttered now. I remember using web portals at that time to search the web and then Google. The difference was day and night. Portals were that bad.
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I suspect quality results also played an outsized factor in most people's switching, even if they don't admit it.
Easy test: are you using Bing now? (with their new clean results pages)
Oh yes. I remember back in early 1998 I was using Copernic to aggregate and filter results from a whole bunch of search engines, because individually their results where so poor and irrelevant. Then I discovered http://google.stanford.edu and never looked back.
Same here except I used dogpile.com
Its not that Google's page is completely cluttered now. I remember using web portals at that time to search the web and then Google. The difference was day and night. Portals were that bad.
I was amazed -- even at the time -- that anyone thought this (http://web.archive.org/web/20000229120749/http://www.altavis...) was a good idea.
I'm really glad UX thinking has progressed.