What made me switch to Google from AV was the simplicity of the Google home page and the clean results page. AV was getting too cluttered, Google loaded faster. (We were still on dial-up too!)
The funny thing is that I remember AltaVista being much cleaner than Yahoo and the other competitors at the time. I think they only switched to the cluttered page to try keep up with the trends. Then Google came along and rolled it all back to basics. (Of course the better results helped too.)
