So the first priority is to attract as many users as possible, which today’s online giants did by creating a great “user experience”. Google, for instance, won out against Alta Vista, the leading search engine in the late 1990s, because its interface was cleaner, searches came up more quickly and the results were more accurate. Once such advantages have been established, they start up all kinds of flywheels. The service attracts users, which attracts suppliers of content (in Google’s case, websites that want to be listed in its index), which in turn improves the user experience, and so on. Similarly, the more people use Google’s search service, the more data it will collect, which helps to make the results more relevant.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/06/30/the-story-of-the-internet-is-all-about-layers/