This was my experience as well. I had a deep link to AltaVista's "advanced" search page which loaded plenty fast.
Between AV and InfoSeek (which I used the Netscape plugin to get a browser search bar for) I was seeing better results than Google until sometime in the mid-00's.
Sure if you wanted to skim the surface of what was available on a given topic or just wanted the most popular links, Google was fine in the 90's and early 00's; But if you were deep diving or wanted something more obscure you needed other search engines.
Between AV and InfoSeek (which I used the Netscape plugin to get a browser search bar for) I was seeing better results than Google until sometime in the mid-00's.
Sure if you wanted to skim the surface of what was available on a given topic or just wanted the most popular links, Google was fine in the 90's and early 00's; But if you were deep diving or wanted something more obscure you needed other search engines.