AltaVista was bad, Google was awesome and I probably would pay $100/month to make up the difference today if I had no choice but to pay. This is on the order of 2.5% of aftertax, pre-rent income. I wouldn't have been able to afford it when Google first came out.

I usually credit altruistic effects to cohorts of agents with logically correlated decisions, rather than assuming that in any election won by two votes, nobody's vote had a marginal effect; this is a separate big issue but says that I wouldn't just assume the consumer surplus generated by their lives' decisions, vanished after somebody else would've done it anyway - somebody has to be the somebody else and get credit for that.