system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: how did Google become so dominant?
gpt
A lot of people are talking about Google's minimalist design but that's not really relevant.  Google became dominant because they simply had a better product.  Their search engine returned significantly better results.

Before Google's PageRank algorithm, most search engines effectively used word counts.  If you searched early Yahoo, AltraVista, etc. for "Corvette" the top result was the site cataloged with the most mentions of the word "Corvette".  Those top results would likely be fan sites, parts dealers, etc.  Chevy.com, etc. would have been pretty low  in the rankings in comparison.

Google completely changed the world when it started using links to a site to rank sites.  So now when you searched "Corvette" Google counted every link and those mostly went to Chevy.com, etc.  The results were infinitely better.