What make Google so successful?

Google is undoubtedly the best search engine that exists and it has made our life whole lot easier. What make Google so successful? What marketing strategy had used by Google? Beginning from just a smart algorithm, Google has developed a totally new business model an it has become in a few years the world leading search engine, has developed winning applications as Google Earth, Google Video, Google Maps, Gmail, and is enjoying a huge success. Google, starting from scratch, has won the challenge against a giant like Microsoft and against the previous search engine market leaders Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista, Excite.
In November 2007, Google Inc. was the 5th biggest US company by considering stock market capitalization.In November 2007, Google shares had topped $700. Google stock market capitalization in November 2007 was $230 billion, in July 2008 was $170 billion. By comparison in July 2008 Microsoft stock market capitalization was $240 billion, General Electric market capital was $270 billion, Exxon stock market capitalization was $450 billion. The key question is: Why the Google Business Model is a winning Business Model? The answer is a complex one, and involves more factors. It's a mix of smart decisions, excellent marketing strategy, great advisors, highly innovative and risky business model, and great products.
These are the key reasons why the Google Business Model won first. Google had and still has a simple, clean, clear, minimalistic user interface. No frills, just the logo and the search box is easy and fast to load. And this was a key feature with the slow internet connections of the early years 1999 -2001 - while Yahoo and most of the other search engines were more like generalistic portals, full of confusion, full of useless features and useless links, full of annoying banner advertisements, heavy and slow to load. Google had a clear understanding on psychology of perception, and how the interaction eye/brain works, while the bigger competitors didn't. Bottom line is: If the user visits a search engine, what he wants to get is simply that: just a search engine. If the user wants a generalistic portal, he goes to a portal, not to a search engine.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google Executives, understood this, and this was what they delivered and made their users happy. Google had and has reliable search results (not always, but most of the time). Page and Brin's PageRank algorithm worked well. Google got good advice from VC's and from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been advised and assisted from the beginning by John Doerr, VC Partner of Kleiner Perkins and by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the leading law firm of Silicon Valley Insight on Google Business Model. Google introduced a smart, innovative and quite risky business model Adwords and the pay per click concept. The risk proved winning, and the innovative business model worked. Still today Adwords is the main source of revenues of Google Inc. In the following years, Google became a powerhouse with an impressive pipeline of new great products. Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Video, Gmail and slim revenues.