Did it?
I thought that back in 1998 or so too. It was only an impression, I never actually tested it out. It was cool back then to point people at this new search engine. And we all said it provided better results, but maybe that was because we'd read it somewhere, and as we now know Google pay a lot of people a lot of money to talk them up. I still recall having to wade into page 50 or so to find relevant stuff, and maybe it would have been on page 55 on Yahoo, or page 45 on Jeeves. I don't know, because I never tried, because Google provided better search results.
Then around 2005 or so I found that it was just another search engine, it didn't provide anything greatly more relevant than any of the other search engines. Except that it was now more likely to have searched through your gmail archives and browser history to select stuff you liked. Which if you think about it for a minute is pretty crap, unless you want your internet to be an echo chamber. Turn all that targeted stuff off and its no better than anything else.